Roughly 160,000 light years away in the Large Megellanic Cloud is the debris of a massive star explosion that was captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This picture is of the brightest of the supernova remnants in the Magellanic clouds, N132D, and is a rare class of oxygen-rich remnants. These type of remnants are thought to be were the oxygen that we breath today has come from. This x-ray image shows low energy x-rays, which appear red, intermediate energy x-rays that appear green and high energy x-rays that appear blue. The majority of the oxygen appears in the green regions of the cloud which are near the center. What is interesting to this cloud is that unlike other oxygen rich debris clouds N132D has an expanding ellipse shaped shell of oxygen. Theoretical work believes that this might be the result of a 'nickel bubble' which occurs shortly after the supernova explosion and is caused by radioactive energy input from nickel that was generated be the explosion. The goal of looking at this star is to further understand the mass of the star that exploded and to learn how these massive stars explode heavy elements like oxygen into space.
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