Lifting the veil

Veil Nebula

A colourful, glowing nebula that reaches beyond the top and bottom of the image. It is made of translucent clouds of gas: wispy and thin with hard edges in some places, and puffy and opaque in others. Blue, red and yellow colours mix together, showing light emitted by different types of atoms in the hot gas. Bright and pointlike stars are scattered across the nebula. The background is black. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sankrit

In this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week, Hubble has once again lifted the veil on a famous — and frequently photographed — supernova remnant: the Veil Nebula. This nebula is the remnant of a star roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun that exploded about 10 000 years ago. Situated about 2400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, this photogenic nebula made an appearance as the Picture of the Week previously in 2021.

This view combines images taken in three different filters by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, highlighting emission from hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen atoms. This image shows just a small fraction of the Veil Nebula; if you could see the entire nebula without the aid of a telescope, it would be as wide as six full Moons placed side by side. Look in the sidebar of this page to see this image superimposed on its location in the sky, and try zooming out to compare the size of the full nebula!

Although this image captures the Veil Nebula at just a single point in time, it will help researchers understand how the supernova remnant has evolved over decades. Combining this snapshot with Hubble observations from 1994 will reveal the motion of individual knots and filaments of gas over that span of time, enhancing our understanding of this stunning nebula.

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Hubble Revisits the Veil Nebula

Veil Nebula
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay

This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revisits the Veil Nebula, which was featured in a previous Hubble image release. In this image, new processing techniques have been applied, bringing out fine details of the nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionized gas.

To create this colorful image, observations were taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 instrument using five different filters. The new post-processing methods have further enhanced details of emissions from doubly ionized oxygen (seen here in blues), ionized hydrogen, and ionized nitrogen (seen here in reds).

The Veil Nebula lies around 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), making it a relatively close neighbor in astronomical terms. Only a small portion of the nebula was captured in this image.

The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of the nearby Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant formed roughly 10,000 years ago by the death of a massive star. That star – which was 20 times the mass of the Sun – lived fast and died young, ending its life in a cataclysmic release of energy. Despite this stellar violence, the shockwaves and debris from the supernova sculpted the Veil Nebula’s delicate tracery of ionized gas – creating a scene of surprising astronomical beauty.

The Veil Nebula is also featured in Hubble’s Caldwell Catalog, a collection of astronomical objects that have been imaged by Hubble and are visible to amateur astronomers in the night sky.

Media contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Editor: Lynn Jenner

 

Source: NASA/Solar System and Beyond

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Revisiting the Veil Nebula

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Revisiting the Veil Nebula

  

 

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The Veil Nebula (ground-based view)

 

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3D image of the Veil Nebula

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Stereo image of the Veil Nebula

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Videos

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Zooming in on the Veil Nebula

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Panning across the Veil Nebula

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Moving filaments of the Veil Nebula

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope imaged three magnificent sections of the Veil Nebula in 1997

Now, a stunning new set of images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 capture these scattered stellar remains in spectacular new detail and reveal its expansion over the last years.

Deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures, the beautiful Veil Nebula is one of the best-known supernova remnants. It formed from the violent death of a star twenty times the mass of the Sun that exploded about 8000 years ago. Located roughly 2100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), this brightly coloured cloud of glowing debris spans approximately 110 light-years.

In 1997, Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) photographed the Veil Nebula, providing detailed views of its structure. Now, overlaying WFPC2 images with new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) data provides even greater detail and allows scientists to study how far the nebula has expanded since it was photographed over 18 years ago.

Despite the nebula’s complexity and distance from us, the movement of some of its delicate structures is clearly visible — particularly the faint red hydrogen filaments. In this image, one such filament can be seen as it meanders through the middle of the brighter features that dominate the image.

Astronomers suspect that before the Veil Nebula’s source star exploded it expelled a strong stellar wind. 

This wind blew a large cavity into the surrounding interstellar gas. As the shock wave from the supernova expands outwards, it encounters the walls of this cavity — and forms the nebula’s distinctive structures. Bright filaments are produced as the shock wave interacts with a relatively dense cavity wall, whilst fainter structures are generated by regions nearly devoid of material. The Veil Nebula’s colourful appearance is generated by variations in the temperatures and densities of the chemical elements present.

The blue coloured features — outlining the cavity wall — appear smooth and curved in comparison to the fluffy green and red coloured ones. This is because the gas traced by the blue filter has more recently encountered the nebula’s shock wave, thus still maintain the original shape of the shock front. These features also contain hotter gas than the red and green coloured ones [1]. The latter excited longer ago and have subsequently diffused into more chaotic structures.

Hidden amongst these bright, chaotic structures lie a few thin, sharply edged, red coloured filaments. These faint hydrogen emission features are created through a totally different mechanism than that which generates their fluffy red companions, and they provide scientists with a snapshot of the shock front. The red colour arises after gas is swept into the shock wave — which is moving at almost 1.5 million kilometres per hour! — and the hydrogen within the gas is excited by particle collisions right at the shock front itself.

Despite utilising six full Hubble fields of view, these new WFC3 images cover just a tiny fraction of the nebula’s outer limb. Located on the west side of the supernova remnant, this section of the outer shell is in a region known as NGC 6960 or — more colloquially — the Witch’s Broom Nebula.

Notes

[1] The colours in the image have been chosen to help identifying the three different species of gas; they do not represent the real colours of the nebula.

More Information

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team

Links

• Images of Hubble
• Link to HubbleSite release
• Uncovering the Veil nebula

Contacts

Mathias Jäger
ESA/Hubble, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 176 62397500
Email: mjaeger@partner.eso.org

Source:  ESA/HUBBLE/News - Space Telescope

The twisted shockwaves of an exploded star

The twisted shockwaves of an exploded star

Copyright: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration. 

Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State Univ.).    

Hi-Res (JPG) - Hi-Res (TIF)

Discovered on 5 September 1784 by astronomer William Herschel, the Veil Nebula was once a star. Now it is a twisted mass of shock waves that appears six times larger than the full Moon in the sky.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows just a small part of the nebula, a region known as the ‘south-eastern knot’. The entire nebula is about 50 light years in radius, and is located almost 1500 light years away.

Ten thousand years ago, the Veil Nebula did not exist. Back then, it was a star, much brighter and larger than our own Sun, burning furiously thanks to the nuclear furnace in its centre. As those reactions faltered when its fuel was exhausted, the star collapsed and exploded.

This is estimated to have happened some 5000–10 000 years ago. Sky watchers would have seen the star brighten enormously over the course of a day or two. It would have become brighter than a crescent moon.

Such a titanically destructive event is called a supernova. Modern measurements show that a supernova can outshine the combined light of 100 billion normal stars. Over the course of a week or so, our ancestors would have watched the fireball fade back into obscurity, only to be rediscovered millennia later by William Herschel as an expanding ball of gases in space.

During the star’s final detonation, it flung its outer layers into space at more than 600 000 km/h. What we see now is these layers colliding with the surrounding gases of interstellar space.

The energy imparted in the collision heated the gas to millions of degrees, causing it to emit light. The wavelength of this light depends upon the atoms present in the excited gas. In this image, blue shows oxygen, green shows sulphur, and red shows hydrogen.

Supernova explosions are important because they seed the Universe with heavy chemicals, building all the elements heavier than iron. They are rare in our galaxy, with only one or two stars exploding over the course of a century.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. This image was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, and was first published in July 2007.

Source: ESA/Images

The Veil Nebula

This image is part of the Eastern Veil Nebula, or NGC 6992, and it was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using filters to isolate the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha), doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) and ionised sulfur (SII) atoms, and coded in the image as red, green and blue respectively. Credit: D. López (IAC). [ JPEG | TIFF | PDF (with text) ]

The Veil Nebula is part of the Cygnus Loop which comprises several NGC objects. Shown here is NGC 6992 in the Eastern Veil. The Veil Nebula is a faint supernova remnant that exploded some 5000 years ago, and since then it has been expanding on the sky to cover some 3 degrees. Its fine and intrincated filaments are attributed to a thin shock wave propagating into space and seen edge-on.

This image was obtained and processed by members of the IAC astrophotography group (A. Oscoz, D. López, P. Rodríguez-Gil and L. Chinarro).

More information:

NGC 6992 - IAC Astrophoto September 2009
IAC Astronomical Picture of the Month