NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured in detail debris from the Veil Nebula, one of the best-known supernova remnants. The Veil Nebula, from a star which exploded about 8,000 years ago, is so called due to its delicate, draped filamentary structure, reports NASA.
The Veil Nebula is but a part of the Cygnus Loop, a donut-shaped nebula that is six times the apparent diameter of the full moon. The Cygnus Loop is an expanding remnant of a blast that resulted when a star, much larger than our sun, had exploded, explains Hubble Site.
About 8,000 years ago, our very distant ancestors might have witnessed the supernova that created the Veil Nebula as a bright "new star" in the northern sky.
Spread across 110 light-years, the entire nebula covers six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
The close-up images show wisps of gas moving into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The dying star, which would have been 20 times more massive than our sun, had emitted a large bubble of low-density gas into space. The nebula lies along the edge of this bubble, according to Astro Biology Magazine.
An array of structures and detail from the collision between the blast wave and the gas and dust that make up the cavity wall is visible in the images. When viewed from the side, the nebula looks like a crumpled bed sheet. Scientists say that the color red is a result of the glow from hydrogen, green from sulfur, and blue from oxygen in the images, reports The Hubble Heritage Project.
Hubble had been successful in recording images of the nebula 18 years ago in 1997. Astronomers are comparing these new images to the old ones, thus getting an opportunity to see how the nebula has expanded since it was last photographed, reports News Wise.
