Hubble’s renewed image of the Veil Nebula will take your breath away

The stars die in fire and fury.

They tremble and tremble, causing their viscera to explode in space; when the star explodes and violence is done, a beautifully shining cloud of star guts remains.

One such event is what created the Veil Nebula, a gossamer flap of a larger supernova remnant called the Cygnus Loop created when a star 20 times the mass of the Sun became a supernova, around 10,000 years ago. .

If you love space photos (and what science lover doesn’t?), You’ve probably seen it – the Hubble Space Telescope released a spectacular image in 2015, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, a rainbow. rainbow of filaments stretching through the darkness of space.

Now, the researchers have reprocessed this data using new techniques, specifying finer details in the gas threads.

(ESA / Hubble and NASA, Z. Levay)

Located at a distance of about 2,100 light years and spanning a length of about 110 light years, the Veil Nebula is believed to have been shaped by a powerful stellar wind emitted before the star exploded.

The wind pushed through the gas that had already been ejected by the dying star, carving out cavities. When the shock wave from the supernova enters this region, it interacts with the walls of the cavity, shocking and energizing the gas therein, and creating the complex filamentous structure of the Veil.

The new image (top) and the 2015 image (bottom). (ESA / Hubble and NASA, Z. Levay; NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage team)

Pictures like this aren’t just a spectacle – they help astronomers understand these interstellar processes. Here, for example, different gases emit slightly different wavelengths of light, which have been color coded – blue for doubly ionized oxygen and red for ionized hydrogen and ionized nitrogen.

Green gases haven’t been disturbed by shock waves as recently as blue, so they’ve had time to cool down and diffuse into their softer chaotic forms.

Because the nebula is always expanding, studying these filaments and their compositions can help us better understand the structure of the cloud and how the shock wave from the supernova interacts with it. These images taken at different times can also be compared to each other to see how fast the shock wave is traveling.

Hubble’s observations in 2015 were compared to images of the nebula taken in 1997 – see video above – and scientists were able to calculate that it was expanding at a speed of 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles). per hour. The diameter of the Earth, for reference, is 12,742 kilometers.

Eventually, the remnants of the hot young star that died so dramatically will all be blown up, scattered throughout the interstellar medium. Even for stars, everything has to end.

You can download a wallpaper version of the reprocessed image from ESA’s Hubble website.