Supernova Remnant DEM L71

Several thousand years ago, a star some 160,000 light-years away from us exploded, scattering stellar shrapnel across the sky. The exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our nearest neighboring galaxies. After swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the sun, the star became unstable and ignited as a Type Ia supernova. The supernova remnant pictured here, known as DEM L71, formed when a white dwarf reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process. Slamming into the surrounding interstellar gas, this stellar shrapnel gradually diffused into the separate fiery filaments of material seen scattered across this skyscape.