FOR RELEASE: February 16, 2000

Onset of Titanic Collision Lights Up Supernova Ring

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers a ringside seat to a never before seen violent celestial "main attraction" unfolding in a galaxy 169,000 light-years away. The knockout event is the collision of the fastest moving debris from an immense stellar explosion seen in Feb. 1987 with the gas ring that circles that site.

Credit: NASA, Peter Challis and Robert Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Peter Garnavich (University of Notre Dame), and the SINS Collaboration