The West Veil Nebula: NGC 6960

Discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, the Veil Nebula occupies a patch of sky six full-moon-lengths long. I couldn’t fit the entire Veil Nebula in the frame so this is only the Western region (the direction of ‘west’ in this photo would be pointing down and east would be pointing up). Common names for this region are: ‘Filamentary’, ‘Witches Broom’, and ‘Finger of God’ nebula. I chose this angle because I think it should also be called the ‘Flying Man’ Nebula.

The Veil Nebula is a region of hot gasses that are remnants of a supernova. A supernova is the stellar explosion of a dying massive star. Stars burn massive amounts of fuel, but when they run out of fuel there is no longer enough outward force generated and it is overtaken by it’s own gravity. In this case, the star would have been 20x the mass of the Sun before it met it’s destructive fate. After a star goes supernova, the original object will either collapse to a neutron star, or a black hole or it will be entirely destroyed altogether. The leftover clouds of gas that were expelled from the explosion are then classified as a ‘supernova remnant’.

Our Sun is classified as a yellow dwarf and will meet a fate other than supernova. Once it runs out of hydrogen, it will expand to 100x its current size, most likely consuming Earth. This won’t happen for another 7.5 billion years, so no need to evacuate planet Earth just yet (at least not for this reason).

God speed Flying Man.