Fireworks in D

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

The let­ter D is out­lined in this celes­tial fire­works dis­play. The col­or­ful fil­a­ments seen in this NASA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image of N49 are all that’s left of a super­nova explo­sion that took place thou­sands of years ago in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud. This super­nova rem­nant is called N 49, or DEM L 190. Inside these sheets of glow­ing star debris lies a pow­er­ful, spin­ning neu­tron star called a pul­sar. Pul­sars give off reg­u­lar pulses of energy like the tick­ing of a very pre­cise clock. After the super­nova blows off the outer lay­ers of the star, it col­lapses under its own grav­ity. The star col­lapses so much that the pro­tons and elec­trons spin­ning around the atoms of the star com­bine to form neu­trons. A neu­tron star is very dense. Imag­ine our entire Sun packed into an area of just 20 kilo­me­ters (12 miles) in diam­e­ter! Grav­ity is very strong on a neu­tron star. On Earth, a spoon­ful of neu­tron star mate­r­ial would weigh bil­lions of tons. The mag­netic field of N 49 is super strong, tril­lions of times stronger than Earth’s, putting it in spe­cial class of bizarre celes­tial objects called magnetars.

Explore the fine fil­a­ments of N 49. The fil­a­ments show the supernova’s blast wave as it trav­els through star clouds in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud. As the fast-moving star mate­r­ial slams into the rel­a­tively calm gas and dust of the star clouds, it causes the gas to heat up and glow. Each ele­ment glows with a dif­fer­ent color.

The LMC is a small, irreg­u­lar galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth. The Mag­el­lanic Clouds were described and named after the explorer Fer­di­nand Mag­el­lan. The clouds, vis­i­ble in the south­ern hemi­sphere sky, were well known to ancient peo­ples. Astronomers used to believe that both the Large Mag­el­lanic and Small Mag­el­lanic Clouds were com­pan­ion galax­ies to our Milky Way Galaxy. Recent find­ings, how­ever, show that the nearby galax­ies are just pass­ing by.