The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured some incredible new images of the luminous Western Veil Nebula, providing fuel for the creation of this inspiring 3D animated flyover of the famous Witch’s Broom section of the nebula.
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The supernova remaints, known as the Veil Nebula, was visible in the night sky thousands of years ago as what looked like a bright star outshining the others.
The tendrils are found in the Veil Nebula, a massive supernova remnant found some 2,100 light-years away.
In a statement accompanying the image, NASA explained what we’re seeing in the image: “the fast-moving blast wave from the ancient explosion is plowing into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The Veil Nebula’s colorful appearance is generated by variations in the temperatures and densities of the chemical elements present”.
The green and blue are from sulfur and oxygen respectively. The close-up pictures captured by the Hubble Space Telescope hone in on a fraction of the space the nebula covers.
“This view is a mosaic of six Hubble pictures of a small area roughly two light-years across”, NASA wrote.
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“Astronomers are comparing these new images to ones taken by Hubble in 1997”. NASA believes the star that created the doughnut-shaped nebula exploded about 8,000 years ago and that its fiery death could have been witnessed by ancient cultures here on Earth, where the event would have been as bright in our sky as a crescent moon.
