Best of Hubble: N63 A from 2005

While we wait, with varying degrees of impatience, for the final Hubble upgrade I thought I'd post about some of my very favorite Hubble images from the past. Given that the Hubble entered orbit in April of 1990, there are a lot of images to choose from and for many images we now have a lot more information and better understanding of what the images show than we did a few years ago.

The image you see linked in this post is usually identified as SR N63a, where SR stands for Supernova Remnant. It's what's left after a massive star exploded, and essentially spewed its gaseous innards outward. It's not an object I've ever been able to see with a telescope, since it's one of those you need to view from the southern hemisphere, where it can be located in the vicinity of the constellation Dorado. N 63 roughly 160,000 light-years away from the Milky Way, our home galaxy. The entire object lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), but the bit we're interested in is a tiny region (A) of N 63; N 63 is an area where stars are still being actively formed.

N63 A was created when its parent star went supernova and died a fiery, explosive death. That star was roughly 50 times more massive than our own Sun. A star that massive, which means density as much as size, has strong stellar winds, strong enough to create a gas blown bubble, and that the star died inside the central portion of that bubble. That bubble, if you will, was embedded in the interstellar medium, the gasses and dust, that form the LMC. The theory is that when its parent died, N 63A was a remnant that got blown away from the parent supernova and that its origins are depicted it the gaseous chaos that remains. You can get a better idea of the process by watching this QuickTime video made by compositing several images from different sources. You'll see the Large Magellanic cloud first, then the bubble, then N 63 A.

N63 A itself is still young enough to eject gaseous matter, and shocks generated by the suprnova are still in motion, and still influencing local gas clouds (when they might otherwise collapse and form new stars).

If you look here, you can see images of the object and surrounding area taken with infrared, X-ray, and based on radio emissions. They show the "bubble" around the optical emission that Hubble photographed. You can see odd, gaseous clouds still held in the bubble cavity, the same sorts of clouds that appear shredded in the Hubble image.

Images in the infrared, X-ray, and radio emission of this supernova remnant show the much more expanded bubble that totally encompasses the optical emission seen by Hubble. Odd-shaped mini-clouds or cloudlets that were too dense for the stellar wind to clear away are now engulfed in the bubble interior. The supernova generated a propagating shock wave, that continues to move rapidly through the low-density bubble interior, and shocks these cloudlets, shredding them rather violently by pulling them in various directions.

It's not outside the realms of possibility that, as the Hubble team puts it "In a few million years, the supernova ejecta from N 63A will reach nearby star-formation sites and may be incorporated into the formation of planets around solar-type stars there." That's an awful lot like one of the possible scenarios for the creation of our own solar system and planets.