An photograph published on Monday by the European Southern Observatory depicts the aftermath of a big star's cataclysmic death and the enormous filaments of brilliantly sparkling gas that were launched into space during the supernova.

The star's mass before exploding at the conclusion of its life cycle is estimated to have been at least eight times that of the sun. About 800 light years away from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Vela, it was positioned in our Milky Way galaxy.

The unsettling image displays gas clouds that, when viewed through the astronomers' filters, resemble pink and orange tendrils and cover an area nearly 600 times the size of our solar system.

'The filamentary structure is made up of the gas that was expelled during the supernova explosion that gave rise to this nebula. We can see the internal components as a star grows in space. According to the European Southern Observatory's Bruno Leibundgut, 'When there are denser places, part of the supernova material shocks with the surrounding gas and produces some of the filamentary structure (ESO).

According to Leibundgut, the image depicts the supernova leftovers approximately 11,000 years after the explosion. The majority of the material's brilliance is caused by excited hydrogen atoms. Leibundgut continued, 'The beauty of such photos is that we can directly see what stuff was inside a star. 'Now that it has been exposed, the material that has been accumulated over many millions of years will cool down over many millions of years, eventually forming new stars. 

In the wake of the supernova, the star itself has been reduced to a pulsar, an enormously dense rotating object. Neutron stars, one of the most compact celestial objects known to exist, include pulsars as a subtype. It rotates at a rate of ten times per second.

The image was a composite of observations made with the wide-field OmegaCAM camera at the VLT Survey Telescope, which is housed at the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. According to the ESO, the image's data was gathered between 2013 and 2016.