Hubble serves up stunning Veil Nebula image

According to NASA, this is cosmic beauty is called the Veil Nebula, and it’s what remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. Now, thousands of years later, the expanding remnant of that blast can be seen as the Cygnus Loop, a donut-shaped nebula that is six times the apparent diameter of the full moon.

Each color corresponds to a different element. In the Veil Nebula, we can see red – from glowing hydrogen; green from sulfur; and blue from oxygen.

The Veil Nebula is one of the best known supernova remnants in the sky, featuring vast wispy structures of hot plasma some 110 light-years across. “Bright filaments are produced as the shock wave interacts with a relatively dense cavity wall, whilst fainter structures are generated by regions almost devoid of material”.

NASA this week released images taken by the Hubble telescope showing the remnants of 8,000-year-old supernova, the Houston Chronicle reports. As impressive as it might be, this view is merely an infinitesimal fraction of the Veil Nebula, astronomers explain.

Hubble Space Telescope has been in space more than 25 years, having been launched aboard Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center on STS-31 on April 24, 1990.

Recently, Hubble zoomed in on an area of the Veil Nebula measuring two light-years across, highlighting colorful streams of gas left over from the violent death of a star 20 times more massive than the Sunday.