Stars die in fire and rage.
They tremble and shake and break out their insides into space; when the star explodes and the violence is done, a wonderful glowing cloud of intestines remains.
Such an event is what created the Veil Nebula, a gorge of a larger supernova remnant called the Cygnus loop that was created when a star was 20 times the mass of the sun supernova, about 10,000 years ago.
If you love space photography (and what science lover does not?), You have probably seen it – the Hubble Space Telescope released a spectacular image in 2015, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, a rainbow of filaments flying across the darkness of space.
Now, researchers have processed this data with new techniques and teased finer details in the wires of gas.
(ESA / Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay)
The Veil Nebula, which is about 2100 light-years away and extends to a length of about 110 light-years, is thought to be formed by a powerful stellar wind that was radiated before the star exploded.
The wind presses into the gas already emitted by the dying star, and cavities hollow. When the supernova shock wave penetrates this region, it interacts with the cavities, shocking and giving the gas power in it, creating the complex, filamentous structure of the veil.
The new image (above) and the 2015 image (below). (ESA / Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay; NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team)
Images like these are not just a spectacle – they help astronomers understand these interstellar processes. Here, for example, different gases emit slightly different wavelengths of light, which are colored – blue for double ionized oxygen and red for ionized hydrogen and ionized nitrogen.
The green gases were not as recently disturbed as the blue by shock waves, so they had time to cool down and disperse into their downy chaotic shapes.
As the nebula continues to expand, studying these filaments and their compositions can help us better understand the structure of the cloud and how the shock wave of the supernova 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 2015 observations were compared with images of the nebula taken in 1997 – see the video above – and scientists were able to calculate that it was expanding at 1.5 million kilometers per hour. The earth’s diameter is 12,742 kilometers.
Eventually, the remains of the young, hot star who died in such a dramatic way will all be blown away, spreading in the interstellar medium. Even for stars, all things must come to an end.
You can download a background-sized version of the processed image from the ESA Hubble Web site.