Supernova Remnant 1E 0102

Gaseous Relic of Titanic Explosion

This Hubble Space Telescope portrait reveals the gaseous remains of an exploded massive star that erupted approximately 1,700 years ago.

The stellar corpse, a supernova remnant named 1E 0102.2-7219, met its demise in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

The image shows ribbons of gaseous clumps speeding away from the explosion site at an average speed of 2 million miles per hour. At that velocity you could travel to the Moon and back in 15 minutes.

This color-composite image was assembled from separate exposures through red, green, and blue filters, which capture the glow of ionized oxygen.

Because the gaseous knots are moving at different speeds and directions from the supernova explosion, those moving toward Earth are colored blue in this composition and the ones moving away are red.

Researchers plumbed the Hubble archive for visible-light images of the supernova remnant. They analyzed the data to calculate a more accurate estimate of the age and center of the supernova blast.

The Small Magellanic Cloud, located roughly 200,000 light-years away, is visible in the southern hemisphere.

This image is a blend of exposures taken in 2014 by the Wide Field Camera 3.

About the colours

These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F467M+FQ492N Green: F502N+F657N Yellow: F665N Red: FQ508N; F673N

About the data

The HST observations include those from program 13378 (D. Milisavljevic)