Daily Telescope: A beautiful supernova remnant from an uncertain age

Enlarge / Behold, the Jellyfish Nebula. (credit: Hamza Syed)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's January 17, and today's image takes us to a supernova remnant about 5,000 light-years from Earth.

This image features IC 443, known colloquially as the Jellyfish Nebula. For obvious reasons, right? The nebula has a diameter that is about 60 percent larger than the Earth's Moon in the night sky. Astronomers aren't sure how old the remnant is, estimating it to be between 3,000 and 30,000 years old. I know that sounds terribly imprecise, but one of the things I remember from getting an astronomy degree decades ago is that if you're an astronomer, and you're within an order of magnitude of being correct, you're doing just fine.