"Inside the Image, Hubble Space Telescope."
"N44 Superbubble"
N44 is what's called an emission nebula it has this bright glowing gases that you see here it's
in what's called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This image is about a thousand light years
across so it's a fairly large nebula this dark void in the center is about 250 light
years across and that is something called a Superbubble area in the nebula that's been
completely cleared out all around it we have dust and gas at various temperatures, various
densities, inside of that bubble we only have what's called ionized gas it's very hot gas.
One of the puzzles in this image or competing ideas and they're probably both
contributing here, neither one seems to be the ultimate solution, one is that the winds of stars
inside the void which include high energy, high speed particles coming out from the surface of
the stars pushing material clearing it out of the center. The other possibility or the other thing
that's probably contributing to the clearing of this Superbubble is supernova. Supernova at the
end of their life if they're massive stars explode which sends out both particles and radiation; these
particle waves that are coming out can act as a snow plow and basically clear out the the void and
push it up against this outer ridge that we see here. If these are happening you should see around
this border stars in the process of formation and in fact we do see stars there and there were about
five million years different in age than the stars that are inside they have formed later after this
compression has happened from the clearing of the inside. It is still expanding not not super fast
it appears that the near edge is coming toward us at about 45 kilometers per second the far
edge is receding at maybe 30, so it's asymmetric which is interesting it's moving a little faster
on one side than the other. It's called the Superbubble because of its size if we go to smaller and
smaller bubbles they become more and more frequent to see a volume of space this large that has been
cleared out so completely is very rare and it's it's super in that way also super just in size!
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