#SciencePop | Space Photo of The Day: Veil Nebula NGC 6960

image source, photo in high resolution 6000x4000

In this picture you can see the consequences of the explosion of a supernova that occurred about 5.000 to 8.000 years ago at a distance of 1,470 light years from the Earth, and today is called Veil Nebula.

Different colors on the original picture correspond to different chemical substances which emit light waves of different lengths. Red - hydrogen, green - sulfur, blue - oxygen.

Once it was a star 20 times more massive than our Sun. After the explosion, the stellar matter scattered to a distance of 55 light years from the epicenter, but quite uneven.

Therefore, the nebula is a non-uniform cloud, and is divided into five constituent parts. The total length of the entire nebula is 100-110 light years.

To be precise, the first image shows just a small section of the Western nebula NGC 6960.

_{[Left] – This is a sky survey image of the Veil Nebula, a 110-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star that exploded about 8,000 years ago in the constellation Cygnus. [Center] – This is a ground-based telescope image of a 15-light-year-long stretch of the eastern portion of the nebula. [Right] – This image shows a two-light-year-wide segment of the remnant as photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases. source}

Despite its small size (by the standards of outer space), Veil Nebula takes a lot of space on the visible sky, due to the fact that is quite close to our planet. If you add a bit of brightness, so that we could observe it with the naked eye, the nebula would look in our sky is 6 times larger than the Moon.

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_{sources: Hubblesite, Veil Nebula, Cygnus Loop and the Veil Nebula.}

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