These threads of red snaking amidst dark, turbulent clouds make up a cosmic object known as SNR 0454-67.2. This tangled web is actually the remnants from when an unstable white dwarf star exploded violently as a Type Ia supernova, a category of stellar explosion used in measuring astronomical distances because of their reliable brightness.
This Hubble image shows a supernova remnant called SNR 0454-67.2. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the visible region of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
SNR 0454-67.2 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about 160,000 light-years from our own Milky Way Galaxy.
This supernova remnant was probably formed by a Type Ia supernova explosion.
Supernovae of this type are the brightest of all supernovae. They can eject material at speeds of the order of 10,000 km/s and outshine an entire galaxy at their peak brightness.
They occur in binary systems in which one of the stars is a white dwarf — the dense, carbon remains of a star that was about the size of our Sun; the other star can be anything from a giant star to an even smaller white dwarf.
White dwarf stars are one of the densest forms of matter, second only to neutron stars and black holes.
Because these stars are so dense, their gravity is particularly intense.
The white dwarf will begin to pull material off its companion star, adding that matter to itself.
When the white dwarf reaches 1.4 solar masses, a nuclear chain reaction occurs, causing the white dwarf to explode.
Because the chain reaction always happens in the same way, and at the same mass, the brightness of Type Ia supernovae are also always the same.
This makes them great markers (standard candles) to obtain and measure distances throughout the Universe.
