This billowing mass of dust filaments and gas tendrils stretching across 100 light-years of space like delicate lace is the Vela supernova remnant — scattered ashes of a star that exploded about 11,000 years ago.
The image has to be large to capture all that detail across such a large swath of sky. As mentioned, the Vela supernova remnant is a nebula that is about 100 light-years across. Because it's about 800 light-years away from us, it means the Vela supernova remnant spans an area on the celestial sphere 20 times larger than the angular diameter of the full moon .
A supernova doesn't just spew a star's guts into deep space; it also leaves behind the dead star's core, now compacted under gravity into an ultra-dense object just 10 or 12 kilometers across. This is called a neutron star. The Vela pulsar is one of the closest pulsars to us, and is blowing what's called a"pulsar wind nebula," which is a smaller nebula inside the larger supernova remnant formed of charged particles emanating from the pulsar and impacting circumstellar material ejected by the obliterated star as well as the wider interstellar medium. In a way, the remnant and the pulsar wind nebula are like a nebula within a nebula, a-la cosmic Matryoshka doll.
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