An image released on Monday by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows the aftermath of the explosion of a large star, capturing the huge filaments of glowing gas that were ejected during the supernova explosion, Reuters reports.

Huge clouds of gas formed as a result of the explosion of a starPhoto: European Southern Observatory

It is believed that before the explosion, this star had a mass at least 8 times greater than our Sun, located in the Milky Way, at a distance of 800 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Velele.

The strange image shows pink-looking gas clouds and branches covering an area roughly 600 times the size of our own solar system.

“The filament structure is the gas that was ejected during the supernova explosion that created this nebula. We see material inside a star as it expands into space. Where there are denser parts, some of the supernova material interacts with the surrounding gas and creates some of the filamentary structure,” explains Bruno Leibundgut, one of ESO’s astronomers.

The image shows the remnants of a supernova 11,000 years after the star exploded.

“Most of these materials glow due to hydrogen atoms. The beauty of such images is that we can directly see the materials that were inside the star,” he added.

The image shows cosmic material accumulated over millions of years

“Materials that have accumulated over many millions of years are now exposed and will cool for millions of years until they eventually form new stars. These supernovae produce many of the elements – calcium and iron – that we carry in our bodies. This is a fascinating part of the evolutionary path of stars,” explains the ESO astronomer.

After the explosion, the star itself became a pulsar, an incredibly frequent object that rotates at dizzying speeds. Pulsars are a special category of neutron stars, one of the most compact objects known in the universe.

The star in question has become a pulsar rotating 10 times per second.

The image released by ESO on Monday is a mosaic created from photographs taken by the OmegaCAM camera of the VLT Survey telescope located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The data for the image were collected between 2013 and 2016 by ESO astronomers.