The Veil Nebula formed about 8,000 years ago after the death of a star 20 times the size of the Sun in a supernova explosion. Now, a new set of Hubble Telescope videos reveal clear images of its violent beauty. The explosion, lightning fast, plowed into a wall of cool, dense interstellar gas, emitting light. The Nebula is along the edge of a large bubble of low-density gas that was blown into space by the dying star before it exploded.
The remnants of the destroyed star are multicolored and stunning, showing a colorful cloud of material that is 110 light years wide and about 2,100 light years from Earth. It’s located in the constellation called Cygnus, or The Swan Nebula.
Where Does the Color Come From?
According to the European Space Agency, in a statement about the new footage, astronomers suspect that before the Veil Nebula’s source star exploded, it expelled a strong stellar wind, which blew a large gravity into the surrounding interstellar gas. As the shock wave from the supernova expands outwardly, it runs into the walls of this chamber, and forms the nebula’s distinctive features. Bright filaments are produced as the shock wave interacts with a relatively dense cavity wall, and fainter structures are generated by regions that are almost devoid of material.
The Veil Nebula’s colorful features are made up of variations in temperature and density of the chemical elements in its cloud. The blues in the images contain hotter gas and ionized oxygen, while the glowing greens come from ionized sulfur and reds indicate glowing ionized hydrogen, according to researchers.
The Images And The Video of the Veil Nebula
The new footage comes from six combined Hubble images, although it shows only two years of the massive cloud. The Hubble Telescope photographed the Veil Nebula in 1997, taken by Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, while the newer images were taken by the Wide Field Camera 3, initially installed in 2009. The new images show an expansion to the Nebula in the past 18 years, and NASA asserts it will continue to expand as more time passes.
