NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has caught its remnant wisps continuing to race into space giving us astonishingly beautiful visuals from a star that exploded 20,000 years ago, . Originally discovered by William Herschel in 1784, the Cygnus Loop is a 120 light-year wide bubble-like shaped nebulous area, located in the constellation Cygnus that is approximately 2,600 light-years away from us. Let’s take a look at what makes these images so special.
The Mesmerizing Visuals of the Cygnus Loop
NASA Astronomers used the Hubble Space telescope to zoom right into a very small area of this expanding bubble, where the blast wave from the supernova pushes any material it encounters in space, causing the material to be pushed causing ripples, like wrinkles in a bedsheet. Hubble images taken from 2001 to 2020 clearly show clear expansion over time, and in the time lapse together show just how these wrinkles move as they are brought along for the ride by the shockwave. Watch the time lapse here.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
As the shockwave moves outward from the supernova explosion, it encounters matter present in the interstellar medium. This matter which would typically be invisible to us gets heated to extremely high temperatures (around 5 lakh degrees Celsius) or more, causing the gas to glow due to these high temperatures all caused by the shock wave from the supernova explosion. The glowing orange wisps are caused by Hydrogen, while the blue fuzz is characteristic of cooling oxygen.
By analyzing the shockwave, astronomers have found that it has been continuing on at the same breakneck pace as it had 20 years ago, traveling at over 8 lakh kilometers per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than half an hour, which actually is on the slow end for the speed of a supernova shock wave, even though it seems like a large number to us.
The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and European Space Agency ESA. It is an extremely powerful reflector telescope launched into Space to give us a view uninterrupted by clouds and other atmospheric effects. Launched in 1990, the telescope has since been operating tirelessly. It is controlled through ground commands, focused on specific areas to obtain stunning visuals of those areas through images of distant stars, galaxies, nebulae and everything beyond. It has sent home hundreds of thousands of images, giving us a peek into the vast ocean of cosmos that surrounds us out in Space.
Hubble has provided images of galaxies in all stages of their evolution, including pictures of extremely old galaxies that might have been around when the universe was still in its early stages. It has pictured stars at various stages of their life as well, through infancy to their brilliant supernova deaths giving us a deeper understanding into the formation of stars and planets, furthering our knowledge of the evolution of the universe.
The Hubble space telescope is the only reason that we are able to witness this supernova bubble expand at such clarity according to Ravi Sankrit, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. He said “The Hubble images are spectacular when you look at them in detail. They’re telling us about the density differences encountered by the supernova shocks as they propagate through space, and the turbulence in the regions behind these shocks.”
The Hubble Space Telescope is known for its other mesmerizing pictures like the pillars of creation, and the butterfly nebula and numerous other spectacular clicks of stunning visuals stitched together by NASA/ESA teams from light captured by the Hubble.
