A Glowing Pencil

Credit: NASA, ESA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

A stel­lar shock­wave from a super­nova 11,000 years ago forms a line in space remind­ing many observers on Earth of a pencil.

The Pen­cil Neb­ula, or NGC 2736, is part of the huge Vela super­nova rem­nant. Located in the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Vela, this part of the super­nova encoun­tered denser gas. The gas from the super­nova moves very fast. The Vela super­nova blasted mate­r­ial into space at 22 mil­lion miles an hour. When it rams into a quiet and dark dust cloud, the gas is heated to mil­lions of degrees. In this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, the squeez­ing of gas and dust in a small area causes the gas to glow with reds, blues and greens. Over time, the speed of the gas mov­ing out slows down. Explore the strands and mov­ing fil­a­ments of the Pen­cil Neb­ula. Cur­rently, those glow­ing strands of gas are mov­ing through space at about 400,000 miles an hour; more than one-and-half times the dis­tance between the Earth and the Moon.

British astronomer Sir John Her­schel dis­cov­ered the Pen­cil Neb­ula in the 1840s. The Vela Super­nova that pro­duced the Pen­cil Neb­ula hap­pened long before that. Although there are no records that humans saw the blast 11,000 years ago as the last glacial period was end­ing, there can be no doubt that it was noticed. The Vela super­nova would have shined 250 times brighter than Venus and would have been vis­i­ble even dur­ing the day. The entire Vela super­nova rem­nant stretches across 114 light years and is only 815 light-years from Earth.