Celestial Fireworks! Resembling the puffs of smoke and sparks from Independence Day fireworks display, this Hubble image depicts the delicate filaments debris from a stellar explosion in a neighboring galaxy.
Denoted N 49, or DEM L 190, this remnant is from a massive star that died in a supernova blast whose light would have reached Earth thousands of years ago. This filamentary material will eventually be recycled into building new generations of stars. Our own sun and planets are constructed from similar debris of supernovae that exploded in the Milky Way billions of years ago.
Image Credit: Image Credit: NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), Y.-H. Chu (UIUC), S. Kulkarni (Caltech) and R. Rothschild (UCSD)
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