Supernova Remnant 1E 0102

This Hubble Space Telescope portrait reveals the gaseous remains of an exploded massive star that erupted 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 at 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 from the supernova explosion, the fastest ones are colored blue and the slowest knots, colored red, in this composition.