Celestial Fireworks

Resembling the puffs of smoke and sparks from a summer fireworks display, The Hubble Heritage Project's July release gives us an awe-inspiring image, just in time to celebrate the 4th of July. The delicate filaments pictured are actually debris from a supernova remnant (stellar explosion) in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Denoted N 49, this supernova remnant is from a massive star that died in a tremendous blast whose light would have reached Earth thousands of years ago. The debris will eventually be recycled into building new generations of stars in the LMC. Our own Sun and planets are constructed from similar debris of supernovae that exploded in the Milky Way billions of years ago.

Today, N 49 is the target of investigations led by Illinois professor You-Hua Chu with Illinois PhD alumna Rosa Williams and Illinois professor emeritus John Dickel. They a nd their collaborators are interested in understanding whether small cloudlets in the interstellar medium of the LMC may have a marked effect on the physical structure and evolution of this supernova remnant.

For more information, check out the Hubble Heritage Project and a recent article in The New York Times.

Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: Y.-H. Chu (UIUC), S. Kulkarni (Caltech) and R. Rothschild (UCSD)

Energized Nebula in the LMC

For the Astronomy Picture of the Day on April 10th, NASA chose a beautiful image of a circumstellar bubble around a Wolf-Rayet star in the Large Magellanic Cloud taken by the MCWG's Yaël Nazéat the European Southern Observatory's Melipal telescope. The emission from the nebula is powered by the radiation and winds from the massive Wolf-Rayet star at the center of the bubble. For more information (and a better look at the image!), check out its APOD page.

Image Credit: Y. Nazé, G. Rauw, J. Manfroid, J. Vreux (Univ. Liege), Y. Chu (Univ. Illinois), ESO

Reflections of a Supergiant Wind

The December release from the Hubble Heritage Project features images and science by Illinois astronomers You-Hua Chu, Rosie Chen, Bryan Dunne, and Robert Gruendl, Illinois alumnus Sean Points, and collaborators Sally Oey, Charles Danforth, and Yaël Nazé. The Hubble Space Telescope images reveal a bow-shock-like halo around the HII region N30B toward the B[e] supergiant Henize S22 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. B[e] stars are a peculiar class of stars; in addition to their normal starlight, they also show emission from warm, dense gas that surrounds the star in a disk. This reflection nebula offers a convenient and unique mirror to probe the properties of the star-disk system in a B[e] star from different viewpoints. The full paper has been accepted for publication in the April 2003 issue of the Astronomical Journal.

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Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: M.S. Oey (Lowell Observatory) and Y.-H. Chu (U. of Illinois)