A scary spider web, a magical dragon, or a ghostly trail? In this picture of the Vela supernova remnant, what do you see?

This beautiful tapestry of colors, revealed on Halloween Day by ESO, shows the ghostly remains of a huge star. It was taken with the VLT Survey Telescope, which is based at the Paranal site of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

A big star that ended its existence some 11,000 years ago in a violent explosion has left only the wispy structure of pink and orange clouds.

Some of the most massive stars explode in a glorious way as they reach the end of their lives, a phenomenon known as a supernova.

Shock waves generated by these explosions travel through the surrounding gas, compressing it and forming beautiful thread-like architectures.

As you can see in this picture, the energy that is released heats the gaseous tendrils, making them shine brightly.

This 554-million-pixel image gives us a very clear look at the Vela supernova remnant, which is named for the southern constellation Vela (The Sails).

Nine full Moons might fit inside this picture, and the actual cloud is much larger.

As far as we know, this stunning supernova remnant is only 800 light-years away from Earth.

As it blew up, the progenitor star’s outermost layers were thrown into the gas around it, making the beautiful filaments we see here.

What’s left of the star is a neutron star, a very dense ball where the protons and electrons have been forced together to make neutrons.

The neutron star in the Vela remnant is a pulsar that spins on its own axis at an incredible rate of more than 10 times per second. It is slightly outside of this image in the upper left corner.

With the wide-field OmegaCAM camera at the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, this image was pieced together from a series of exposures.

The 268-million-pixel camera has the ability to snap pictures with a variety of color filters. This image of the Vela remnant was created using four distinct filters, shown here in a colorful mashup of magenta, blue, green, and red.

The National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy (INAF) owns the VST, which has a 2.6-meter mirror and is one of the biggest telescopes that can be used to look at the night sky in visible light.

The VST Photometric H Study of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+) is one such survey, and the image you see here is an example from it.

Through the course of more than seven years, this survey has documented a sizeable chunk of our own galaxy, which has helped astronomers gain a deeper comprehension of how stars are born, develop, and ultimately die.

Source: ESO

Image Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team

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