When a star explodes, the expanding gas, will, over thousands and even tens of thousands of years, mix with the pre-existing gas between the stars. When it does, they interact and form sheets, ribbons and filaments.
Can’t imagine it? Good thing the National Optical Astronomy Observatory has a gorgeous picture of it:
This image shows just one small section of the Veil Nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. It was made by my buddy Travis Rector, whom you may remember from my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures (he put together the image of galaxy IC 342). The picture is comprised of two pointings of a 64 megapixel camera sitting on the back end of a 4-meter telescope. I don’t know about you, but my 5 megapixel camera suddenly looks a little weak.
This was a press release today, and I was just chatting with Fraser and Pamela about it. There’s no real news affiliated with it, but sometimes I think it’s OK just to release a pretty picture and say, "Look! Hawesome!"
January 8th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Stunning… just stunning!
January 8th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] AAS #5: Tortured Veil By The Bad Astronomer It was made by my buddy Travis Rector, whom you may remember from my Top Ten Astronomy Pictures (he put together the image of galaxy IC 342). The picture is comprised of two pointings of a 64 megapixel camera sitting on the back end of … Bad Astronomy Blog – http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog [...]
January 8th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I wish I was there, looks like a lot of fun probably mixed in with a lot of work.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Look at the very top center of that pic! I see a face! Seriously, it’s there.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Yes, I see it too. Just shows how much of our brain’s image recognition apparatus is wired to recognize faces.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
(No doubt it’s going to freak out some idiots though).
January 8th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
It LOOKS like a HUMAN face, therefore, it IS a face. And since it IS a HUMAN face, it MUST have been sculpted as a SIGNAL for us.
Is it just me, or does THIS face look a lot like the one on Mars?
*Sarcasm mode off*
January 8th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Right on!!! Guarantee that some religious type will ‘recognize’ it as the face of a suffering Christ, as painted by a medieval artist. A small cult will spring up, worshiping the veil. Marvellous!!
January 8th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
A 64 megapixel camera is going to put a dent in my hard disk space, I seem to come home with about a hundred pictures from a weekend trip.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:24 am
That picture of IC342 is today’s APOD – good job, BA, you win Randi’s million for your precognitive abilities!
January 9th, 2008 at 5:26 am
lamacher – there already is a cult worshipping Veronica’s Veil, among other things.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:57 am
[...] Look! Hawesome! (Can anything good come out of Texas?) Published 9 January 2008 Episcopal Wag of the tail to Bad Astronomy blog [...]
January 9th, 2008 at 8:24 am
And if you look at the bottom left and towards the bottom middle you will make out the outline of a person trying to fend off a ferocious creature. Think I need to get out more.
January 9th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I’d love to have a poster-sized print of this. Does the NOAO offer such things?
January 9th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Beautiful picture, fanciful explanation.
“When a star explodes, the expanding gas, will, over thousands and even tens of thousands of years, mix with the pre-existing gas between the stars. When it does, they interact and form sheets, ribbons and filaments.” BA
Show me an experiment in which gas is injected into a vacuum chamber and it forms glowing sheets, ribbons or filaments. (Or even a computer simulation of that happening)
Why are there pairs of helical twisting filaments?
I think that it is pretty clear that these are charged plasma structures not a structure made of neutral gas.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
It’s the face of Homer Simpson. Isn’t it obvious?
January 9th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I can’t be the only one thinking Star Trek Generations.
Great picture.
OEJ
January 9th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I wish I had been keeping a better log of my observation nights so I had some idea of how many hours I have spent at my 10″ Dob looking thru an Oxy3 filter at this object. In a really dark location where you have a really transparent dark sky, there are few objects prettier. Of course, I have never seen the kind of detail seen in this photo, but I have seen a lot of structure and the more you look, the more you see. What a wonderful hobby, pasttime, passion, astronomy is. Thanks for the reminder Phil
)
January 9th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
occam’s comic said:
> Show me an experiment in which gas is injected into a vacuum chamber and it forms glowing sheets, ribbons or filaments. (Or even a computer simulation of that happening)
1. The glowing is not the gas emitting visible light, but reflected light and different spectra of infrared shifted to visible colors.
2. No vacuum chamber will demonstrate this because the scale is immense – galaxy sized interactions.
3. I don’t have any computer simulations, but the appearance is remisniscent of turbulence visible in water.
> Why are there pairs of helical twisting filaments?
What pairs of helical twisting filaments?
> I think that it is pretty clear that these are charged plasma structures not a structure made of neutral gas.
I think you are misinterpreting what you are seeing.
January 9th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Hi Irishman,
If you click the link and download the largest picture and look closely at the filaments, you will see that many of them come in pairs that twist around each other. (this is a common behavior of plasma.)
Responding to point 1.
It is my understanding the picture was taken using visible light, I may be under the wrong impression and it may be a composite IR/ Vis, the information was not given.
But that got me thinking how can we tell the difference between reflected light from nearby stars and emitted light from a plasma. If this is a plasma structure it should be glowing more strongly with UV light, I don’t think that would be the case for light reflected off gas clouds. Has anybody looked at the “Veil” in UV?
January 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I see a lot of texture in the image. I see some zones where the texture could be interpreted as spirals. However, I think they could alternately be interpreted as areas where the surface reflections and transluscencies interact, kind of like a shiny silk scarf piled up in a wrinkly clump. So I guess my question is how do you differentiate spirals from wrinkles?
January 11th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Actually, the light from these filaments is in fact emission from the gas – that is, the gas itself is giving off light. (These are for that reason called “emission-line” images.) The atoms in the gas are “excited” – that is, they gain energy, and electrons move up to higher energy-levels. In this case, since the Veil Nebula is part of a supernova remnant (the result of a very very large explosion of a star), the shock of the explosion is what did the original exciting of the atoms.
The atoms then spontaneously de-excite; the electrons go to lower energy levels, and the atom emits energy – in the form of light – at precise wavelengths corresponding to the type of atom and the former energy level of the electron. Short version: the excited atoms give off light, which we then detect.
The press release doesn’t say what specific wavelengths made up this picture, but a common scheme used by supernova-remnant folks at NOAO is to use lines of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen as red, green, and blue. This image looks like what I’d expect from that sort of color-coding.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Thanks. I emailed the press release contact, got a response that wasn’t very detailed. He did comment the image was visible light, composite image of several filters, and color coded for different gases.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Hey Irishman
take a look at this picture of plasma filaments and you can see the similarities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Plasma-filaments.jpg