JAKARTA – A mysterious “superbubble” hole appears in the latest Hubble shot at N44.
N44 is a complex nebula filled with glowing hydrogen gas, dark dust lanes, massive stars, and a large population of stars of all ages. However, one of its most distinctive features is a dark starry fissure called a “superbubble”, which is visible in the Hubble Space Telescope image in the upper center region.
The hole is about 250 light years wide and its whereabouts are still a mystery. Space winds ejected by the massive star in the interior of the bubble may have dislodged the gas, but this is inconsistent with the wind speed measured in the bubble.
Another possibility, because the nebula is filled with massive stars that will end up in a giant explosion, is that the expanding shell of an old supernova formed a cosmic cave.
Astronomers have discovered one supernova remnant around the superbubble and identified an age difference of about 5 million years between the star inside and at the edge of the superbubble, indicating several chain reaction star formation events.
The dark blue region around 5 o’clock around the superbubble is one of the hottest regions in the nebula and the region’s most intense star formation. N44 is an emission nebula, meaning its gas has been energized, or ionized, by radiation from nearby stars.
As the ionized gas begins to cool from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, it emits energy in the form of light, causing the nebula to glow. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, N44 stretches about 1,000 light years and is about 170,000 light years from Earth. (E-4)
News Source: RRI.
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