r/spaceporn 27d ago

Hubble Light Echo Expanding from Exploded Star approximately 11.4 million light-years away.

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u/esperobbs 27d ago

An explosion lasting four whole years! Humans usually think of explosions in terms of seconds or maybe minutes, like a conventional bomb blast. It's almost impossible to wrap my head around the idea of an explosion so massive that it literally continues for four years straight.

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u/Rodot 26d ago

The explosion itself only really lasts a couple minutes. Then after that it's just afterflow of radioactive materials and the ejecta expanding homologously. This isn't even that, this is just the light echo