Sister Supernovas Leave Billowing Bubbles of Gas

These bubble-like nebulae, cosmic clouds of gas and dust, appear to float through the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy and reveal interesting findings about supernova remnants. The Gemini South Multi-Object Spectograph (GMOS) on the ground-based Gemini South telescope captured the dramatic image of the vast cloud complex, named DEM L316. The nebulae, while looking almost like one object, are two distinct gas and dust clouds formed by different types of supernova explosions.

DEM L316 was first recognized in the early 1970s as a supernova remnant, a type of object that is enriched with elements created in stellar explosions, though it was likely created a few tens of thousands of years ago by more than one type of supernova exploding in this region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The LMC is a sister, satellite galaxy to our Milky Way and lies about 160,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Dorado. The DEM L316 nebula is located within the LMC, and its two bubbles extend over a distance of about 140 light-years — roughly 35 times larger than the distance between our Sun and its nearest stellar neighbor.

For more information, go to: http://www.gemini.edu/node/265

The Gemini Observatory is an international collaboration supported by the National Science Foundation in the United States and counterparts in the U. K., Canada, Chile, Australia, Brazil and Argentina.

- Peter Michaud, Gemini Observatory and Ellen Ferrante, National Science Foundation

Image credit: Gemini Observatory/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, P. Michaud, S. Fisher, and R. Carrasco from Gemini and T. Rector from the Univ. of Alaska at Anchorage / Gemini Observatory