Veil Nebula: Hubble telescope details shrapnel of exploded star

These remnants come from a star NASA says was 20 times that of our sun, and the light show is produced by the fast-moving gaseous remnants of the star’s explosion running into low-density gas that had been expelled by the star when it was dying before it went supernova.

The new set of images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 reveal the tangled and still expanding remains of the supernova star that exploded 8,000 years ago.

More than 2,000 light years away, in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, float the remnants of a shattered star. “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”.

The short 3D flyover video creates the effect of traveling through the wispy skeins of gas, colored to correspond with different elements. Then there’s green for sulfur and blue for oxygen. As impressive as it might be, this view is merely an infinitesimal fraction of the Veil Nebula, astronomers explain. And when it comes to space, nature can be even more lovely as NASA once again proved with its Hubble space telescope.

The view is made up of six Hubble pictures of an area roughly two light-years across.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990, takes highly detailed visible-light pictures in space and is versatile due to its ability to observe ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.