NASA's Hubble Space Telescope investigates stellar shrapnel!

Photo Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu

New Delhi: The US space agency NASA has released a picture of the aftermath of the energetic detonation of stellar shrapnel scattering across the sky.

According to NASA, several thousand years ago, a star some 160,000 light-years away from the earth exploded and scattered the stellar shrapnel.

The striking image is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

As per reports, the exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our nearest neighboring galaxies. Around 97 percent of stars within the Milky Way that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the sun are expected to end up as white dwarfs. These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae, some of the brightest events ever observed in the universe. If a white dwarf is part of a binary star system, it can siphon material from a close companion. 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 the supernova remnant pictured here, which is known as DEM L71. It formed when a white dwarf reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process.