NASA's Hubble Telescope captures "Stellar Shrapnel"

NASA’s Hubble Telescope has captured yet another dazzling photograph. This time, it's of scattered "stellar shrapnel" from a star that exploded 160,000 light-years away from Earth. The spectacular image comes courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Even though the Image was taken recently, the event occurred thousands of years ago. This is due to the distance between us and the star.

The image taken is of a white dwarf that belongs to a neighbouring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

“Around 97 percent of stars within the Milky Way that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the sun are expected to end up as white dwarfs. These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae, some of the brightest events ever observed in the universe. If a white dwarf is part of a binary star system, it can siphon material from a close companion. After gobbling up more than it can handle — and swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the sun — the star becomes unstable and ignites as a Type Ia supernova,” said NASA.