Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Banovetz and D. Milisavljevic (Purdue University)

This Hubble Space Telescope portrait reveals the gaseous remains of an exploded massive star that erupted 1,700 years.

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.

Researchers plumbed the Hubble archive for visible-light images of the supernova remnant. They analyzed the data to calculate a more accurate estimate of the age and center of the supernova blast.

The Small Magellanic Cloud, located roughly 200,000 light-years away, is visible in the southern hemisphere.

This image is a blend of exposures taken in 2014 by the Wide Field Camera 3.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2021/news-2021-002

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/