Colorful Debris

Bright blue stars sparkle in front of the Vela Supernova Remnant--an expanding cloud of gas and dust from an exploded star in the southern constellation Vela, the sail. The star exploded roughly 11,000 years ago as seen from Earth. Today, the remnant is dozens of light-years across. Its debris swirls around as it encounters surrounding gas, dust, and magnetic fields. All that remains of the original star, which was many times the mass of the Sun, is a neutron star--a dense ball about twice the Sun's mass but no bigger than a city. This image, snapped with a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, contains more than 550 million pixels, and is the most detailed view of the Vela Supernova Remnant to date. [ESO/VPHAS+ team. Acknowledgement: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit]