An array of nebulas scattered throughout the Milky Way. The process of star formation within these giant clouds has been likened to fireworks, celebrating the birth of new generations of stars.
(Source: asterisk.apod.com)
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Reblog Post — 9 notes
The Horsehead Nebula, embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula, is seen in this representative-color image from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against another, brighter nebula.
(Source: nasa.gov)
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NGC 604 is an emission nebula, an H II region in a spiral arm of the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), about 2.7 million light-years away from Earth. This monstrous star-birth region contains more than 200 brilliant blue stars, much more massive than our Sun, within a cloud of glowing gases nearly 1,500 light-years across, over 40 times the size and over 6300 times more luminous than the Orion Nebula .
(Source: annesastronomynews.com)
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Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse
Black Widow Nebula
Nicknamed the Black Widow Nebula, the cloud is teeming with clusters of massive young stars, seen as yellow specks in the center of this frame. Radiation from the stars is blowing the surrounding gas into two opposing bubbles, forming the bulbous body and spindly legs of the cosmic crawler.
With an infrared telescope, “Spitzer” astronomers have found crystals of olivine in the protostar HOPS-68, which is located in the constellation Orion.Indeed, for the formation of such crystals requires high temperatures, approximately 800-1 200 K. Therefore, the young stars that have not yet reached the main sequence, olivine occurs only in the interior, the “hot” area of the disk.
(Source: rofltime.com)
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A pulse of light emitted in 2002 from a red supergiant star called V838 Monocerotis illuminates a cloud of interstellar dust. The dramatic whorls around the central star are trillions of miles across and were unknown to scientists until Hubble snapped this image in 2004.
