NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures Insane Image of the Veil Nebula

Some 8,000 years back, a star located in the constellation Cygnus, at a distance of about 2,100 light-years from our planet, reached the end of its life and, well, went kaboom.

The Veil Nebula name comes from its delicate and draped structures. This shot of the gossamery structure looks a lot more detailed compared to previous attempts, thanks to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which used six fields of view for magnification.

Stunning images of one of the best-known supernova remains were captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

What you’re looking at is an expanding cloud of dust and gases that resulted from the supernova of a star 20 times as big as the Sunday. On its periphery lies a bubble of low-density gas blown into interstellar space by the now-dead star, prior to its explosion.

The short 3D flyover video creates the effect of traveling through the wispy skeins of gas, colored to correspond with different elements.

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”.

In the video, red shows a hydrogen glow, green is from sulfur and the blue is from oxygen.

Eight thousand years ago, our ancestors may have witnessed what seemed like a bright new star in the sky.