Only 5,000
to 10,000 years ago, a star familiar to human observers detonated and burned
with a brightness comparable to that of a crescent moon—an event visible even
in broad daylight.
The dead
star's name may be lost, but its shattered remains are known as the Veil Nebula
or Witch's Broom Nebula. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers
three extreme close-ups of the supernova
remnants' wispy clouds of dust and gas still careening into space some 1,500
light-years away from Earth.
Astronomers
released the cosmic snapshots today.
The biggest
stars live the shortest lives because they burn their light fuel into heavy
leftovers, often collapsing and bursting apart in catastrophic supernova
explosions that can outshine a galaxy of stars, as the Veil Nebula's progenitor
did.
When a star
detonates, the explosive shock wave hurtles stellar remnants into space at
about half the speed of light, forming a shell of gas and dust. The Veil
Nebula's shell spreads over a viewing area as wide as six full moons in our
sky, and it still glows with the energy of its violent cosmic birth.
The Hubble
close-ups reveal the rope-like filaments of gas in the nebula, which resulted
from enormous amounts of dusty debris plowing into gaseous surroundings.
Thicker filaments of material result from viewing the supernova's shock wave
edge-on, while more wispy and diffuse views correspond to a face-on view of
other parts of the shock wave from Earth.
Such
supernovas may not seem relevant to humanity, but in fact they are the basis of
it.
The handful
of explosions that occur in the Milky Way each century, as well as
explosions across time in other galaxies, create most of the heavier elements
in the Universe such as copper, mercury, gold and uranium. In our galaxy, the
expanding shells of material eventually mix with others in the Milky Way and
form the raw material for new solar systems with stars, planets and possibly
life.
Hubble is a
cooperative effort of NASA and the European Space Agency.
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