The spiral galaxy
UGC 11860 seems to float serenely against a field of background galaxies in
this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. UGC 11860 lies around 184 million
light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, and its untroubled appearance is
deceiving; this galaxy recently played host to an almost unimaginably energetic
stellar explosion.
A supernova explosion – the
catastrophically violent end of a massive star’s life – was detected in UGC
11860 in 2014. Astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to search through the aftermath and analyze the
lingering remnants of this vast cosmic explosion.
One team explored UGC 11860 to understand
more about the star systems that eventually meet their demise in supernovae.
The hugely energetic processes during supernova explosions are predominantly
responsible for forging the elements between silicon and nickel on the periodic
table. This means that understanding the influence of the masses and
compositions of the progenitor star systems is vital to explaining how many of
the chemical elements here on Earth originated.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit:
ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. D. Lyman
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