74 ASTRONOMY • MARCH 2020
BREAKTHROUGH
A BLAST FROM THE DISTANT PAST
The stars at night may seem eternal, but none can survive forever. A once-vibrant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud
(LMC) — the Milky Way’s biggest satellite galaxy — met its end in a titanic explosion that lit up Earth’s southern sky a few
thousand years ago. The resulting supernova remnant, LMC N63A, now spans some 50 light-years. This image combines
observations from two orbiting observatories: The Hubble Space Telescope captured visible light (brown and tan) from
several irregularly shaped clouds of gas and dust heated by the explosion’s shock waves, and the Chandra X-ray
Observatory recorded X-rays (red, green, and blue) from multimillion-degree gas swept up by the expanding shock waves.
ENHANCED IMAGE BY JUDY SCHMIDT (CC BY-NC-SA), BASED ON CHANDRA (NASA/CXC/SAO) AND HUBBLE (NASA/STSCI) DATA