Wheres the dust?
Located 200,000 light-years away, the Small Magellanic Cloud is a smaller companion to our own galaxy, the Milky Way. “Most of the previous work was focused only on our galaxy because we didn’t have enough resolution to look further away,” said astrophysicist Snezana Stanimirovic, a member of an international collaboration out of the University of California, Berkeley. While doing a study to map the dust distribution of the entire Small Magellanic Cloud, her team captured a high-resolution infrared image of E0102, the exploded remnant of a once-massive star (20 times the size of our Sun) that went supernova about 1,000 years ago as observed from Earth. According to their calculations, announced earlier this month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the observable dust content of E0102 is only 4 percent of what the models predict. That’s an amount of dust roughly equal to the mass of all the planets in our solar system, whereas theory predicts it should be 200 to 2,000 ti
