The Veil Nebula

[toxicity]

I just wanted to share some information about one of many spectacles of beauty we observed in the universe in 2017, of which I caught myself reminiscing in awe this morning. The information is derived directly from NASA's website, of which I used and evidently saved for a reference on a paper I wrote last semester on the interstellar medium and nebulae. Hope you enjoy.

 

 

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago.

 

Called the Veil Nebula, the debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped intricacy in it's structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

 

This view is a mosaic of six Hubble pictures of a small area roughly two light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula’s vast structure.

 

This close-up look unravels wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our sun. The fast-moving blast wave from the ancient explosion is plowing into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The nebula lies along the edge of a large bubble of low-density gas that was blown into space by the dying star prior to its self-detonation.