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NASA's Hubble space telescope captured the ribbon of a supernova blast that ancient humans saw about 15,000 years ago
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NASA's Hubble space telescope captured the ribbon of a supernova blast that ancient humans saw about 15,000 years ago

No space telescope had ever captured the glowing ribbons of the Cygnus Loop — remnants of a supernova blast wave — in such detail before.

Science & Tech

The supernova explosion of a massive, dying star was so bright that ancient humans would have seen it from Earth about 15,000 years ago.

The supernova's blast wave continues to scream through space, heating and compressing dust and gas in a way that causes them to glow in a web of colorful ribbons called the Cygnus Loop.

NASA's Hubble space telescope recently captured an image of the Cygnus Loop in unprecedented detail.

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When a star runs out of the nuclear fuel burning at its core, it collapses under its own weight. This death is so violent and sudden that it sends out a shock wave that hits the star's outer layers and causes them to explode in a supernova — the largest type of explosion humans have ever seen.

Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, ancient humans probably saw one such explosion glowing in the skies. It came from a dying star about 20 times the mass of our sun. The supernova was about 2,500 light-years away, but it glowed so bright that it was visible from Earth.

"This was before written language, but the universe kept a beautiful record of the blast," science writer Corey Powell recently wrote on Twitter.

That's because the explosion's blast wave is still expanding through space, at a speed of about 220 miles (350 kilometers) per second. The edges of the blast wave push material from the supernova through low-density matter in space, heating and compressing tendrils of dus and gas.