A Colorful Ribbon in Deep Space

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While appearing as a delicate and light veil draped across the sky, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope actually depicts a small section of the Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2400 light-years away.



"The original supernova explosion blasted apart a dying star about 20 times more massive than our Sun between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago," NASA added. "Since then, the remnant has expanded 60 light-years from its center. The shockwave marks the outer edge of the supernova remnant and continues to expand at around 220 miles per second."

Source: Hubble finds dead star in deep space that resulted in an orange shockwave

Beautiful.

Looks a lot like cigarette smoke.

Hard to believe that its actually moving at a rate of more than one tenth of one percent of the speed of light. One part in a thousand is not usually thought as a lot, but if its the SOL it IS a lot. Probably has some noticeable Einsteinian time dilation effects.

That has a Lorentz factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor) of 1.0000005

A quartz watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock) has a precision of 0.0006% and would not be able to reliably measure this 0.00005% change, but there are many more wonderful time pieces such as the Atomic Fountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_fountain) which should be able to measure this change.

So if I got on my space surfboard and caught that wave I wouldnt age appreciably slower?

Bummer.

At least it would still be a thrill!