Working in NASA can be very fascinating and give you out-of-this-world experiences. This is what happened when last week, scientists working with the Hubble Telescope released images from a faraway cosmos. It looked like the remnants of supernova were a Pac-Man that was eating away the stars ahead.
Via Space.com, the image shows N 63A, which is the dregs of a supernova which is basically the explosion that can occur over the final phases of a star’s lifespan.
N 63 A is located in our own satellite galaxy which is called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMG), 163,000 light-years away from the Milky Way. It isn’t a supernova itself, but the remnants of it are. Supernova is known to leave a chaotic mess after themselves along with gases and heavy metals but according to NASA, “N 63A is still young, and its ruthless shocks are destroying the ambient gas clouds, rather than coercing them to collapse and form stars.”
To clear any confusion, the observation is static and the supernova is not actually gobbling up the stars. It just seems like it.
Pac-Man was first released by a Japanese video game company Namco in 1980 by a nine-person team after game director Toru Iwatani invented a character based on a pizza with a slice taken from it. The game went on to earn revenues over $14 billion since its release and is one of the most famous pieces of pop culture iconography. (Google even turned it into a playable Google Doodle).
Besides this, it is a relief to see Hubble being functional after some technical issues hobbled it for a few weeks over the summer. But a working telescope is only worth so much without an excellent imagination at the helm. It was a person who deciphered this sight and related it to the game. Cheers to the person for having such intriguing imagination.