A giant gas bubble spanning 325 light years appears ready to gulp down some of its neighbours in a newly released image taken by the Gemini South Telescope in Chile.
The entire region is known as the N44 superbubble complex and is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The bubble may have formed when one or more massive stars in the central cluster exploded as supernovae, sweeping away the nearby gas.
This resulted in a mouth-shaped opening. But it is not certain how the bubble evolved and other uncertainties surround this superbubble.
"When we look at the speed of gases in this cloud we find inconsistencies in the size of the bubble and the expected velocities of the winds from the central cluster of massive stars," says Phillip Massey, an astronomer with Lowell Observatory in Arizona, US, who studied this region of the sky.
"Supernovae, the ages of the central stars, or the orientation and shape of the cloud might explain this, but the bottom line is that there's still lots of exciting science to be done here and these new images will undoubtedly help," Massey says.
The picture was taken on 9 November 2005.
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14:09 04 July 2008
