Nebulae are a very colorful space feature. If you ever get a chance to see one, you would agree. I have been researching nebulae for the past few days, in particular the horsehead nebula, and I have learned quite a bit about these vibrant space displays. Nebulae are a large cloud of hydrogen, helium, various other gasses, dust particles, and plasma often containing new stars or the remnants of old stars. There are several types of nebulae. They are emission, reflection, dark and planetary nebulae. Emission Nebulae are the most colorful nebulae. Reflection nebulae reflect the light from stars. Dark nebulae such as the horsehead nebula are dark in color. Planetary nebulae were discovered when telescopes were not very advanced and early astronomers thought that they were planets. …show more content…
Stars are formed by the gasses in nebulae. In a way, you could say that nebulae are the nurseries for baby stars. Nebula means cloud in Latin. When ancient astronomers discovered nebulae, they compared them to the clouds, and that is how nebulae acquired their name. The horsehead nebula is called so because it resembles a horse’s head. The horsehead nebula is also called Barnard 33. I assume that is for categorization purposes. The first nebulae were discovered by a man named Charles Messier. He found them when he was looking for comets. The horsehead nebula was discovered by a female astronomer by the name of Williamina Fleming in 1888 at the Harvard College Observatory. There are many nebulae in space, more than we can chart. Since universes start with or end with nebulae or black holes, they are not uncommon. The horsehead nebula is in the constellation Orion. It is located slightly under Orion’s belt. The horsehead nebula is about 1,500 light years away from Earth. Orion’s nebula, which can be found directly under Orion’s belt is the closest nebula to Earth. Orion’s nebula is is exactly 1,344 light years away. The horsehead has an absolute magnitude of
The Lagoon Nebula featured as Nasa’s astronomy picture of the day was photographed by John Nemcik using various filters to capture the light emitted by the Hydrogen, Sulfur, and Oxygen. While photographed showing beautiful vibrant, eye-catching colors, the Nebula would appear naturally appear gray to human eye due to poor color sensitivity existing at low-light levels (spacetelescope.org). The Lagoon Nebula is home to the formation of new stars, as well as several other interesting phenomena such as Bok globules, and the hourglass nebula. It is these regions of the nebula that make it a continuous area of interest and study for astronomers.
Nebula away so that it can avoid certain things. In the short story, “The Star,” the priest stated,
Stars are born and reborn from an explosion of a previous star. The particles and helium are brought together the same way the last star was born. Throughout the life of a star, it manages to avoid collapsing. The gravitational pull from the core of the star has to equal the gravitational pull of the gasses, which form a type of orbit. When this equality is broken, the star can go into several different stages. Some stars that are at least thirty times larger than our sun can form black holes and other kinds of stars.
The Orion Nebula is an emission nebula because of the O-type and B-type stars contained within it. These high-temperature stars emit ultraviolet (UV) light that ionizes the surrounding hydrogen atoms into protons (H+) and electrons (e-). When the protons and electrons recombine, the electrons enter a higher energy level (n=3). Then, when the electron drops from the n=3 level to the n=2 level, an Hphoton is emitted. 2 This photon has a wavelength of 6563 Å, and therefore corresponds to the red portion of the visible spectrum. It is these H photons which give the nebula the distinctive red color which we see.
Solar nebula is a rotating flattened disk of gas and dust in which the outer part of the disk became planets while the center bulge part became the sun. Its inner part is hot, which is heated by a young sun and due to the impact of the gas falling on the disk during its collapse. However, the outer part is cold and far below the freezing point of water. In the solar nebula, the process of condensation occurs after enough cooling of solar nebula and results in the formation into a disk. Condensation is a process of cooling the gas and its molecules stick together to form liquid or solid particles. Therefore, condensation is the change from gas to liquid. In this process, the gas must cool below a critical temperature. Accretion is the process in which the tiny condensed particles from the nebula begin to stick together to form bigger pieces. Solar nebular theory explains the formation of the solar system. In the solar nebula, tiny grains stuck together and created bigger grains that grew into clumps, possibly held together by electrical forces similar to those that make lint stick to your clothes. Subsequent collisions, if not too violent, allowed these smaller particles to grow into objects ranging in size from millimeters to kilometers. These larger objects are called planetesimals. As planetesimals moved within the disk and collide with one another, planets formed. Because astronomers have no direct way to observe how the Solar System formed, they rely heavily on computer simulations to study that remote time. Computer simulations try to solve Newton’s laws of motion for the complex mix of dust and gas that we believe made up the solar nebula. Merging of the planetesimals increased their mass and thus their gravitational attraction. That, in turn, helped them grow even more massive by drawing planetesimals into clumps or rings around the sun. The process of planets building undergoes consumption of most of the planetesimals. Some survived planetesimals form small moons, asteroids, and comets. The leftover Rocky planetesimals that remained between Jupiter and Mars were stirred by Jupiter’s gravitational force. Therefore, these Rocky planetesimals are unable to assemble into a planet. These planetesimals are known as asteroids. Formation of solar system is explained by solar nebular theory. A rotating flat disk with center bulge is the solar nebula. The outer part of the disk becomes planets and the center bulge becomes the sun.
By 1936, astronomers had realized that the hazy balls they sometimes saw in their telescopes, which looked like stars obscured by gas, were actually galaxies (Hibbison).
Carl K. Seyfert was an American astronomer. Seyfert was born on February 11, 1911. He was the son of a pharmacist in Cleveland, Ohio where he also got his high school education (Messier). Although born in Cleveland, Ohio he died in Nashville, Tennessee on June 13,1960 in a automobile accident. Seyfert was 49 years old when he died. There was a galaxy named the ‘Seyfert galaxy’ after Carl K. Seyfert called attention to them in 1944 (Britannica). In this galaxy there were 2 different types that were recognized. In the year 1943 he made a paper all about stars with strong light emissions (Wikipedia).
If the nebula is dense enough, certain regions of it will begin to gravitationally collapse after being disturbed. As it collapses the particles begin to move more rapidly, which on a molecular level is actually heat, and photons are emitted that drive off the remaining dust and gas. Once the cloud has collapsed enough to cause the core temperature to reach ten-million degrees Celsius, nuclear fusion starts in its core and this ball of gas and dust is now a star. It begins its life as a main sequence star and little does it know its entire life has already been predetermined.
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
Democritus, a pre-socratic philosopher, is credited with first hypothesizing that the bright band which runs across the night sky may be a close cluster of stars. Democritus lived around the year 400 BC. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Galileo Galilei provided proof that the galaxy was made up of many stars, using an early telescope. Then in the 18th century a man name Thomas Wright postulated that the galaxy what actually a gigantic rotating clus...
There are eighty-eight total constellations in the night sky. There are fifty-five constellations in the southern hemisphere, twenty in the northern hemisphere, and five on the celestial equator. Celestial means positioned or relating to the sky, or outer space from a space point of view. Celestial is used to describe things related to the heavens such as angels, stars, spirits, and planets. The word Celestial is from the Latin word caelestis, which also brought about the word ceiling.
The Hubble Telescope is the world’s first space-based optical telescope. The Hubble telescope received its name from American astronomer Dr. Edwin P. Hubble. Dr. Hubble confirmed an ever expanding universe which provided the basic foundation of the Big Bang theory. The first concept of the Hubble telescope came from Lyman Spitzer in 1946 who at that time was a professor and researcher at Yale University, Professor Spitzer believed that Earth’s atmosphere blurs and distorts light and a space orbited telescope would be able to surpass this problem. He spent nearly all of his life dedicated to making this concept into a reality. (http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/)
The Andromeda Galaxy is the Milky Way Galaxy’s closest neighbor; with it being around 2.5 million lightyears away from Earth. It was once referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older readings. It gets its name from the Andromeda constellation which in turn received its name from the Greek goddess Andromeda.
Nebulae are cosmic clouds of dust and gas floating in space. The word nebula is Latin and means cloud. Originally the word nebula referred to any extended astronomical object, not including comets, planets, or satellites. But over time the word nebula became reduced to mean interstellar cloud of dust and gas. Calling it that does not do a nebula justice. Most nebulae are commonly made up of hydrogen and helium gasses, dust, and plasma. Nebulae are the building blocks of our universe; they contain all the things stars need to form. Scientists classify nebulae in to one of two major categories; bright and dark. From there they narrow it down more to planetary nebulae, emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, dark nebulae, and supernova remnants. Bright nebulae are close enough to stars to glow, and dark nebulae are to far away from stars to do so. Dark nebulae are only visible if a star cluster or other bright object provides a backdrop. Sometimes they are part of a bright nebula. A good example of this phenomenon would be the Trifid Nebula. It is a bright nebula divided into three sections by dark “alleys” spanning across it. Getting down into the smaller categories, planetary nebulae form when a star cannot support itself by fusion reactions in its center. Gravity forces the outer layers of the sun in on its core, making the insides heat up and condense. The heat from the center blows the outsides away in a stellar wind over a few thousand years. When the star finishes the only thing left of it is the core. The core then heats the distant gasses and they glow because of this. Despite planetary nebula being called planetary nebula, planets have nothing to do with them. They are a very common nebula in our galaxy, as there are an es...
Supernovae are stars that explode. All supernovae can happen one of two was. One happens in the Binary star system, and the other happens at the end of a stars life time. Most supernovae can outshine entire galaxies, and put off more energy than our sun can produce in its entire life time. With some of the supernovae scientist can use them to help understand the expansion of the universe. Not every supernova can be used to study the expansion of the universe. Supernovas can tell us things about the universe that no one knew.