Veiled Fish

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

Wispy fil­a­ments of the Veil Neb­ula resem­ble a fish with multi-colored fins in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. The scat­tered pieces of the Veil Neb­ula are all that remains of a bril­liant super­nova that exploded 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. The entire neb­ula spans a huge area in the sky equiv­a­lent to six full moons.

Explore the fine fil­a­ments in the Veil Neb­ula. What other pat­terns do you see in this cloud of gas and dust?

Stars, like peo­ple, are born and die. Some stars like our Sun have lifes­pans of about 10 bil­lion years. But other stars that are much larger and more mas­sive than our Sun burn their fuel so rapidly that they live for only a few mil­lion years. These huge stars, 10 to 100 times the size of our Sun, explode in super­nova explo­sions so bright that they briefly out­shine an entire galaxy. From Earth, the super­nova that cre­ated the Veil Neb­ula would have been vis­i­ble even dur­ing the day­time, shin­ing as brightly as a cres­cent Moon.

The tem­per­a­tures and pres­sures inside a super­nova explo­sion are essen­tial for mak­ing all chem­i­cal ele­ments heav­ier than iron. Super­novae are the main pro­duc­ers of oxy­gen in the uni­verse. They also forge the ele­ments lead, cop­per, sil­ver and gold. The super­nova explo­sion that cre­ated the Veil Neb­ula cre­ated a bub­ble of gas and dust in space about 50 light-years across. It con­tin­ues to expand even now, spread­ing ele­ments into the Milky Way to become new stars, plan­ets and even peo­ple one day.

Also known as the Cygnus Loop, the Veil Neb­ula lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion of Cygnus the Swan.