Jellyfish Nebula

The Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) is a supernova remnant roughly 5,000 light years away in Gemini — the shattered corpse of a massive star that detonated somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000 years ago. What you're looking at is the shockwave still rippling outward through the interstellar medium, slamming into surrounding molecular clouds and lighting them up. The intricate filaments in the shell are where that blast wave is colliding with dense gas at hundreds of kilometers per second, heating it until it glows. To the left, IC 444 fills the field with pillars of emission and dust being sculpted by the radiation of nearby stars — a stellar nursery sitting right next to a stellar graveyard. Creation and destruction separated by a bridge of shocked gas. This region is also one of the strongest sources of evidence for cosmic ray acceleration at supernova shockfronts — the universe's own particle accelerator, hiding in plain sight.