The rate of supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Image Credit: C. Smith,
S. Points, the
MCELS
Team and
NOAO/AURA/NSF

The picture above is of the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. The LMC is one of the closest galaxies to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. (Read here if you need to remind yourself what a galaxy is).

One of the troubles with trying to understand the Milky Way is that we are in it (can't see the forest for the trees), and large portions of the Milky Way are blocked from our view by clouds of dust and gas. We can see the entire LMC, on the other hand, and it is close enough that we can see fairly typical individual stars! So, with the LMC, we can study both the forest and the trees. There is another, smaller galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that is roughly the same distance away, in a slightly different direction, which is likewise useful for studying an entire galaxy along with the component stars.

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of some stars. There are two main types of supernovae, Type Ia supernovae, which are thought to be the explosions of certain white dwarfs, and ...