To give people a glimpse of the vast universe beyond the limits of Earth, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) uses eye-catching graphics. Its social media posts not only astound viewers but also educate them. An impressive example of this is the Instagram video showcasing the aftereffects of a star's supernova explosion. The video was posted on the Hubble Space Telescope's Instagram page.
The caption of the video reads, "Ride the (shock) wave! This time-lapse video shows Hubble images of the Cygnus Loop, the tattered remnants of a star's supernova explosion, taken in 2001 and 2020. The remnant's shock front has expanded with time, traveling into interstellar space at over half a million miles per hour (~805,000 km/hr)."
NASA also included a description of the video in the caption: "Two images labeled 2001 and 2020 blink back and forth. They show an orange ribbon of light extending horizontally against the black space dotted with stars. The ribbon appears to expand."
On its official website, NASA wrote, "Astronomers used Hubble to zoom into a very small slice of the leading edge of this expanding supernova bubble, where the supernova blast wave plows into surrounding material in space. Hubble images taken from 2001 to 2020 clearly demonstrate how the remnant's shock front has expanded over time, and they used the crisp images to clock its speed."
"The nebula, called the Cygnus Loop, forms a bubble-like shape that is about 120 light-years in diameter. The distance to its center is approximately 2,600 light-years. The entire nebula has a width of six full Moons as seen in the sky," it added.
"Hubble is the only way that we can actually watch what's happening at the edge of the bubble with such clarity," said Ravi Sankrit, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
The video was posted on September 29. Since being shared, it has amassed over 1 million views and over 50,000 likes. It has also attracted several comments.
One individual wrote, "Our beautiful and forever mysterious universe."
Another commented, "Amazing how some stars display very small movements!"
A third person said, "How breathtaking that our universe creates the most beautiful shapes through massive stellar events! I wonder if the 'ripples' we can see are particles of star dust riding gravitational waves, like how duckweed rides the waves in a pond?"
