Fast Gas Bullet from Cosmic Blast N49

Fast Gas Bullet from Cosmic Blast N49 - This might be a speeding remnant of a powerful supernova that was unexpectedly lopsided. Scattered debris from supernova explosion N49 lights up the sky in this composited image. Glowing visible filaments (shown in yellow), and X-ray hot gas (shown in blue), span about 30 light-years in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Light from the original exploding star reached Earth thousands of years ago, but N49 also marks the location of another energetic outburst - an extremely intense blast of gamma-rays. The source of that outburst is now attributed to a magnetar - a highly magnetized, spinning neutron star also born in the ancient stellar explosion which created supernova remnant N49. The magnetar, visible near the top of the image, hurtles through the supernova debris cloud at over 40 thousand miles per hour. The blue blob on the far right, however, might have been expelled asymmetrically just as a massive star was exploding. If so, it now appears to be moving over 4 million miles per hour. — at lmage Credit: NASA/CXC/Penn State/S. Park/STScI/UIUC/Y.H. Chu/R. Williams.