Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Once a star, the Veil Nebula is now a twisted mass of shockwaves that appears to be six-times the size of our moon, but it sure is nice to look at – as demonstrated by a high-resolution image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and released by the ESA on Monday.
The image, which the agency explains was originally captured by Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 eight years ago, shows just a small portion of the nebula: an area known as the “south-eastern knot.” In its entirety, the Veil Nebula, which is located roughly 1,500 light years from Earth, has a radius of approximately 50 light years, Gizmodo said.
Flinging its outer layers into space
The nebula did not exist 10,000 years ago, the ESA explained. Back then, it was a star, far larger and brighter than our Sun. Ultimately, some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, the nuclear reactions that took place in its center ran out of fuel, causing it to collapse and ultimately explode.
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During this process, it would have become extremely bright for a period of one or two days, as it underwent the massively destructive event known as a supernova. Afterwards, over the course of about a week, the fireball would have faded away, and the nebula was ultimately forgotten about until it was re-discovered by astronomer William Herschel on September 5, 1784.
“During the star’s final detonation, it flung its outer layers into space at more than 600,000 km/h. What we see now is these layers colliding with the surrounding gases of interstellar space,” ESA officials said. The energy from the collision caused the gas to heat to millions of degrees, and led to the nebula to emit light in various wavelengths based on the atomic content of the gas.
Rope-like filaments of gas
In the image captured by Hubble, blue indicates the presence of oxygen, while green depicts that the gases contained sulfur and red indicates that hydrogen is present, the agency said. Supernova explosions seed the universe with chemicals that form all elements heavier than iron. They occur rarely in our galaxy, with just one or two exploding every century, the ESA added.
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The Veil Nebula (which is also known as NGC6960) is cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus, and according to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, it is one part of a supernova remnant known as the Cygnus Loop. In the New General Catalogue, the brightest segments of the nebula were designated NGC 6960, 6974, 6979, 6992, and 6995.
The image released by the ESA on Monday is far from the only one of the Veil Nebula captured by the Hubble telescope. In 2007, it photographed three sections of the supernova remnant which provided “beautiful views of the delicate, wispy structure resulting from this cosmic explosion.”
The nebula’s “intertwined rope-like filaments of gas… result from the enormous amounts of energy released as the fast-moving debris from the explosion ploughs into its surroundings and creates shock fronts,” scientists at the joint NASA/ESA telescope project said at the time. Those high-speed shocks caused gas to heat, and the subsequent cooling produced the nebula’s glow.
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“The Veil Nebula is a frequent object of study for astronomers because it is large, located relatively close to Earth, and makes a good example of a middle-aged supernova remnant,” the Constellation Guide added. “For amateur astronomers, the nebula makes one of the most spectacular objects in the northern sky.”
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