NASA has released an image taken by the Hubble telescope of a giant monstrous space ‘Pac-Man’ munching its way across the Cosmos.
That isn’t a happy Pac-Man munching its way across the Universe. Even so, this stellar explosion remnant resembles the iconic video game gobbler in a newly released NASA image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The object, known as N 63A, is the remnants of a supernova — a violent explosion caused by a star imploding under its own weight at the end of its life — in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMG), a nearby galaxy 163,000 light-years from the Milky Way and one of the few galaxies visible with the naked eye from Earth.
The LMG is home to several star-forming regions, or nebulae, where large clouds of gas condense and collapse to form new stars. The supernova remnant is located in one of these stellar nurseries, surrounded by numerous stars, and this dense cluster of stars resembles the power pellets gulped down by Pac-Man in the popular video game.
JUAN CARLOS CASADO
By ejecting gas and heavy elements, supernovas are known to trigger the formation of stars and planets in their surroundings. According to NASA, the powerful shock waves in this case appear to have stalled star formation in the region by dispersing the surrounding gas, which was already in the process of forming new stars.
However, N 63A is still young, and as it settles into its final configuration, NASA predicts that it will likely kick-start its own star-forming region in the future.
The Hubble Space Telescope was out of action for nearly a month between June and July due to a hardware malfunction that forced NASA to put it in “safe mode,” as previously reported by “I Love The Universe”. However, technicians were able to restart the satellite, which was launched in 1990, and it is now taking out-of-this-world photographs of the surrounding Universe.
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