Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope took some time peering into the anatomy of the Veil Nebula and snapped images of filamentary structures found within a segment about 2 light-years across.
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Hubble also photographed the Veil Nebula back in 1997, so the new images are helping astronomers gauge how the gas cloud has evolved and expanded over the last 18 years.
NASA reminded us of this fact Thursday with the video above made from Hubble images, which travel from a view of the night sky on Earth to the colorful and captivating Veil Nebula a full 1,470 light-years away.
The star exploded 8,000 years ago, and is actually 110 light years across, according to NASA.
“This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our sun”, said NASA.
“Not long before the dawn of recorded human history, our distant ancestors would have witnessed what appeared to be a bright new star briefly blazing in the northern sky, rivaling the glow of our moon”. On its periphery lies a bubble of low-density gas blown into interstellar space by the now-dead star, prior to its explosion.
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The light emitted by the nebula is created by its blast wave colliding with a denser gas. In the description of the video, NASA points out that the different colors in the nebula correspond to different types of gases. In the 3D visualization, red is sulfur, green is hydrogen and blue is oxygen.
