Chandra Release - January 14, 2000

Visual Description: E0102-72.3

Chandra image of a supernova remnant, which is dominated by blue and purple colors and has a circular but irregular shape in the center of the image. This supernova remnant, E0102-72.3, is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf irregular galaxy about 200,000 light-years away from Earth.   This X-ray image of E0102-72 shows an expanding multimillion degree ring of oxygen that was created deep inside a massive star and hurled into space by the explosion of the star. The ring is about 30 light years across and contains more than a billion times the oxygen contained in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere.