The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the supernova remnant DEM L71, which is found in the constellation of Dorado.
This Hubble image shows DEM L71, a supernova remnant located 160,000 light-years away in the constellation of Dorado. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Y. Chu.
Around 97 percent of stars within our Milky Way Galaxy that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the Sun are expected to end up as white dwarf stars.
These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae.
If a white dwarf is part of a binary system, it can siphon material from a companion star.
After gobbling up more than it can handle – and swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the Sun – the star becomes unstable and ignites as a Type Ia supernova. This was the case for DEM L71.
The exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy some 160,000 light-years away.
DEM L71 formed when the star reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process.
Slamming into the surrounding interstellar gas, this stellar shrapnel gradually diffused into the separate fiery filaments of material seen scattered across this skyscape.
The color image of DEM L71 was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, the main imager on the telescope.
It is based on data obtained through four filters: a blue filter (F457W), two green filters (F555W, F656N) and an IR filter (F814W).
