Large, massive starsend their furious lives in spectacula supernovaexplosions -- but small, low mass stars may encounter a similar fate.In fact, instead of simply cooling offand quietly fading away,some white dwarf stars in binary star systemsare thought to draw enough massfrom their companions tobecome unstable, triggering nuclear detonation.The resulting standard candle stellar explosion is classified asa Type Ia supernovaand perhaps the best example yet of the aftermathis this expanding cloud of shocked stellar debris, DEM L71, i the nearbyLarge Magellanic Cloud.The sharp false-colo x-rayimage from the orbitin ChandraObservatory shows the predicted bright edges of the outerblast wave shock region andthe x-ray glow of an inner region of reverse shock heated gas Based onthe Chandra data, estimates for the compositionand total mass of expanding gasstrongly suggest that this is all that remains of a white dwarf star.Light from this small star's self-destructive explosion would havefirst reached Earth several thousand years ago.
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