The stars die in fire and fury.
They tremble and shake, exploding their viscera into space; when the star explodes and the violence ends, a bright cloud of stellar guts remains.
One such event is the one that created the Veil Nebula, a gossamer fragment of a larger supernova remnant called Cygnus Loop created when a star 20 times the mass of the Sun became a supernova about 10,000 years ago. .
If you like space photography (and what science lover doesn’t?), You’ve probably seen them: the Hubble Space Telescope released a spectacular image in 2015, taken with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, a rainbow of filaments the darkness of space.
Now, researchers have reprocessed this data using new techniques, causing more detail down to the gas wires.
(ESA / Hubble and NASA, Z. Levay)
Located at a distance of about 2,100 light-years away and with a length of about 110 light-years, it is believed that the Veil Nebula was modeled by a powerful stellar wind emitted before the star exploded.
The wind pushed the gas that had already been expelled by the dying star, emptying cavities. When the supernova’s shock wave pushes toward this region, it interacts with the walls of the cavity, impacting and energizing the existing gas, 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)
Images like this are not just a spectacle, but help astronomers understand these interstellar processes. Here, for example, different gases emit slightly different wavelengths, 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 spread in their most chaotic and fluffy forms.
As 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. These images taken at different times can also be compared to 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 video above) and scientists were able to calculate that it is expanding at a rate of 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) per hour. The diameter of the Earth, as a reference, is 12,742 kilometers.
Eventually, the remains of the young hot star that died in such a dramatic way will be razed, scattered by the interstellar medium. Even for the stars, all things have to end.
You can download a wallpaper version of the reprocessed image from ESA’s Hubble website.