We are part of a vast universe.

     What is our place in this amazing cosmos?

           What is your place in this world?

                     The sands of time may be limited!

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Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly
    deeps
Work out a perfect will.

     - Lionel Pigot Johnson

Photo Credits:                                                                                
P. Challis, R. Kirshner (CfA), and B. Sugerman (STScI), NASA  
  

In February 1987, light from the brightest stellar explosion seen in modern times reached Earth - supernova SN1987A. This Hubble Space Telescope image taken in November 2003 shows the explosion site over 16 years later. The snap shot indicates that the supernova blast wave continues to impact a pre-existing, one light-year wide ring of material, and the supernova remnant continues to expand. Like pearls on a cosmic necklace, bright hot spots produced as the blast wave heats material up to millions of degrees began to appear on the ring in the mid 1990s.
    Supernova SN1987A lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy some 170,000 light-years away. That means the explosive event - the core collapse and detonation of a star about 20 times as massive as the Sun - occurred 170,000 years before February 1987, but it took that long for the light from this cosmic event to reach us on earth.