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The Hubble Telescope captures images of the fireworks left by the explosion of the great star

Reported by SpaceOn Tuesday (6/12/2022), a stunning vein in this Hubble Space Telescope image are supernova remnants, catastrophic explosions that are triggered when a massive star reaches the end of its life.

Called DEM L or LMC N49, a stellar remnant located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Dorado. It is the brightest supernova remnant within the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The light from this explosion swept across the Earth thousands of years ago. The sheets and thin strings of material left behind by supernovae will eventually become the building blocks of the next generation of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

However, the 75 light-year-wide supernova debris cloud is not the remnant of an explosion. Scientists believe this cloud of glowing material hides a rapidly spinning neutron star that was created when the core of a massive exploding star collapsed under the tremendous pressure of its own gravity.

The mass of this neutron star is around that of the sun or greater, but condensed into a very dense mass. By definition, a teaspoon of matter inside a neutron star would weigh 4 billion tons (3.6 billion tons).

This ultra-dense stellar object rotates once every eight seconds. Its magnetic field is about a quadrillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetosphere.

Astronomers discovered this neutron star in 1979 when it was emitting dramatic high-energy gamma rays. Since then, this neutron star has emitted several more gamma-ray bursts, meaning it is now classified as a “soft gamma-ray booster”. A rapidly rotating neutron star with a strong magnetic field that emits this type of radiation is also known as a pulsar.

The new image was created using data from two separate surveys of DEM L 19. One of these involved the now-retired Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

The goal of this first spacecraft was to study how supernova remnants interact with the interstellar medium (the fine dust between stars) in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Specifically, the team wanted to find out how a small cloud of gas and dust causes a supernova remnant to evolve and change its structure.

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