Veil Nebula - Amazing Photos

31-Jul-2007: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has photographed three magnificent sections of the Veil Nebula - the shattered remains of a supernova that exploded some 5-10,000 years ago. The new Hubble images provide beautiful views of the delicate, wispy structure resulting from this cosmic explosion.

The intertwined rope-like filaments of gas in the Veil Nebula result from the enormous amounts of energy released as the fast-moving debris from the explosion ploughs into its surroundings and creates shock fronts. These shocks, driven by debris moving at 600,000 kilometres per hour, heat the gas to millions of degrees. It is the subsequent cooling of this material that produces the brilliantly coloured glows.

The colour is produced by composite of three different images. The different colours indicate emission from different kinds of atoms excited by the shock: blue shows oxygen, green shows sulphur, and red shows hydrogen.

The images are simply superb, just beware, some of them are quite large, but there are smallish views of them as well.

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