The space is beautiful.
As the Hubble Space Telescope approaches the end of its long-running mission, photo publications are a constant reminder of how much we benefit from a closer look at the remnant space. The beautiful orange ribbon you see is the remains of a dead star that exploded in a supernova about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.
From our point of view on Earth, the exploding star once lived in the northern constellation, Cygnus aka The Swan. The photo captures a piece of ribbon-like blast wave about 2,400 light-years away.
The NASA post noted that the full wave “covers an area 36 times larger than the full moon.” In that sense, the earth is about four times larger than the moon. So it’s a pretty big blast wave!
The star that exploded was 20 times the size of our own sun. That’s the way supernovae happen: when a giant star ends up – which is, say, at least five times larger than our Sun – it explodes, sending the star’s contents outward.
In the thousands of years of saying goodbye to this particular star, the blast wave emanating from it has expanded to 60 light-years. The ribbon-like appearance is the result of NASA’s post notes, “Interaction of Extruded Materials and the Interaction of Materials with Minimum Density by Shockwave”.
In simple words: the material released by the explosive star blends with the gas and dust that floats in space to give us a huge, absolutely magnificent space ribbon.
