Hubble telescope sees delicate ribbon of gas floating eerily in our galaxy

This cosmic image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a delicate ribbon of gas floating eerily in our Milky Way galaxy. Actually, it is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago, according to NASA.

The image is a composite of hydrogen-light observations taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in February 2006 and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations in blue, yellow-green, and near-infrared light taken in April 2008.

In this image, many background galaxies (orange extended objects) far off in the distant universe can be seen dotting the image. Most of the white dots are foreground or background stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Happy 4th of July! This celestial "stars and stripe" is actually a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago.More on this @NASAHubble image at https://t.co/P1sWX3HpgB pic.twitter.com/rOILhbKDEz

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) July 4, 2022

According to NASA, on or around May 1, 1006 A.D., observers from Africa to Europe to the Far East saw and recorded the arrival of light from what's now called SN 1006, a tremendous supernova explosion caused by the final death throes of a white dwarf star nearly 7,000 light-years away. The supernova remained visible to the naked eye for at least two and a half years before fading away.

In the mid-1960s, radio astronomers first detected a nearly circular ring of material at the recorded position of the supernova. The size of the remnant implied that the blast wave from the supernova had expanded at nearly 20 million miles per hour over the nearly 1,000 years since the explosion occurred.

Further, in 1976, astronomers reported the first detection of exceedingly faint optical emission of the supernova remnant, but only for a filament located on the northwest edge of the radio ring. A tiny portion of this filament is revealed in detail by the Hubble observation.

In this Hubble image, the twisting ribbon of light corresponds to locations where the expanding blast wave from the supernova is now sweeping into very tenuous surrounding gas.