Hubble Zooms in on Shrapnel from an Exploded Star

September 24, 2015 10:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2015-29
Bright gas in neon shades of yellow, green, blue, pink, and purple appears like a wave in the foreground, diagonally from bottom left to upper right. In the background more gas is visible with the same colors and same orientation, but with more streamers coming off into space. Small stars are scattered through the image.

Summary

Not long before the dawn of recorded human history, our distant ancestors would have witnessed what appeared to be a bright new star briefly blazing in the northern sky, rivaling the glow of our moon. In fact, it was the titanic detonation of a bloated star much more massive than our sun. Now, thousands of years later, the expanding remnant of that blast can be seen as the Cygnus Loop, a donut-shaped nebula that is six times the apparent diameter of the full moon. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to zoom into a small portion of that remnant, called the Veil Nebula. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases. Supernovae enrich space with heavier elements used in the formation of future stars and planets – and possibly life.

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