Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Veil Nebula!

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole

It looks like silk. It is a corpse. About 2,100 light-years away in Cygnus, the Swan, a star twenty times the Sun’s mass tore itself apart some 8,000 to 20,000 years ago. For a little while it would have outshone Venus and burned in daylight. What remains is this: a shock wave still racing outward, slamming into cooler gas at nearly a million miles an hour, lighting filaments so thin they earned the name Veil. The whole loop spans about 110 light-years — six full Moons of wreckage on our sky. This frame is only a sliver of that wreck. The colors are not paint. They are elements in a collision. Blue often traces oxygen; red, hydrogen; the golds and greens, sulfur and the rest of a dead star’s leftovers. Hubble’s close-ups turn the “fabric” into wires and sheets, edges sharper than they have any right to be. Compare plates from 1997 and later and the veil has moved. A supernova does not finish when the light fades. It keeps writing. So this is a neighbor, as neighbors go — close enough that we can watch a funeral still unfolding. Beauty here is just physics that refused to stay buried. Credit: NASA / Hubble (National Geographic Image Collection)