The stars die in fire and rage.
She trembled and shook, her viscera bursting into space; when the star explodes and the violence ends, a bright cloud of star courage remains.
One such event is what created the Veil Nebula, a piece of gossamer from a larger supernova remnant called the Cygnus Loop created when a 20-fold-larger star of the Sun became a supernova about 10,000 years ago.
If you like space photos (and which science lover don’t you?), You’ve probably seen them – the Hubble Space Telescope launched a spectacular image in 2015, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, a rainbow of filaments stretching across the darkness of space.
Now, researchers have reprocessed that data using new techniques, removing finer details in the gas wires.
(ESA / Hubble and NASA, Z. Levay)
Located at a distance of about 2,100 light-years away and extending over a length of about 110 light-years, it is believed that the Veil Nebula was shaped by a strong stellar wind emitted before the star’s explosion.
The wind blew into the gas that had already been thrown by the dying star, hollowing out the cavities. When the supernova shock wave pushes into this region, it interacts with the walls of the cavity, shocking and energizing the gas in it and creating the complex, filamentous structure of the Veil.
New image (top) and 2015 image (bottom). (ESA / Hubble and NASA, Z. Levay; NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team)
Such images are not 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 double ionized oxygen and red for ionized hydrogen and ionized nitrogen.
Green gases have not been bothered by shock waves as recently as blue, so they have had time to cool down and diffuse into their more fluffy chaotic forms.
Because the nebula is still expanding, studying these filaments and their compositions can help us better understand the structure of the cloud and how the supernova shock wave interacts with it. Such images taken at different times can also be compared with each other to see how fast the shock wave moves.
Hubble’s observations from 2015 were compared to images of the nebula made in 1997 – see the video above – and scientists were able to calculate that it was expanding at a rate of 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) per hour. The diameter of the Earth, for reference, is 12,742 kilometers.
Eventually, the remains of the young hot star who died so dramatically will all be blown away, scattered in the interstellar environment. Even for the stars, all things must end.
You can download a background version of the reprocessed image from ESA’s Hubble website.