Located in the sword of Orion, the Orion Nebula, also known as M42 or NGC 1976, lies in one of the most recognisable constellations in the night sky. It is a part of the larger Orion Nebula Cluster which at the age of roughly 3 million years old it lies a mere 1,344 lightyears away with a diameter of 14 lightyears [Scally, Clarke, Mccaughrean, 2005]. A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust [Oxford Dictionary, 2016] where either new stars are born or dead stars remain. The Orion Nebula is both an emission and reflection nebula, known as a diffuse nebula. An emission nebula is one in where there is a cloud of high temperature gas [Arnett, 1997]. A reflection nebula is one where the cloud of gas is illuminated by stars around it. The nebula has a …show more content…
To begin they are both reflection nebulae however the Orion Nebula has the added classification of an emission nebula due to its ionization of hydrogen. NGC 2261 differs from NGC 1976 in the fact that it is variable, it changes shape and brightness due to dark dust clouds passing by R Monocerotis. References Anonymous. (1998). A closer look at Hubble's Variable Nebula. Sky and Telescope, 95, 24-25. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?sid=e3eaa20f-cd07-4589-9e1a-64af362890ae%40sessionmgr4001&vid=0&hid=4207&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d&preview=false#AN=170864&db=f5h Arnett, B. (1997). Types of Nebulae. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from The Web Nebulae: http://astro.nineplanets.org/twn/types.html James, A. (2015). The Great Orion Nebula: M42 & M43. General AStronomy Articles. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from http://www.southastrodel.com/Page204.htm Masi, G. (2014, October 24). NGC 2261, the "Hubble Nebula" - Mon. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0:
Four weeks after space-walking shuttle Endeavour astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1993, an ecstatic Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski waved a Hubble picture of the core of the spiral galaxy M100 at her naysaying colleagues. Today, Mikulski could host a Capitol Hill star party: The orbiting telescope has generated more than 100,000 photos of celestial objects, including a cemetery of dying stars, elephant trunks of dust and hydrogen gas twisting in the Eagle Nebula, jovian storms and aurorae, the rocky rings of Saturn and the colossal supernova smoke rings blown from an exploded star, to list a few. Hubble's pictures do double duty not only as congressional lobbying props, but also as screen savers, T-shirt prints, calendar photos, a background for the "Babylon 5" science fiction TV series and even planet trading cards to be provided soon to schoolchildren.
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.
Hubble, Edwin. 1929, "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173
2, Alter Dinsmore, Cleminshaw H. Clarence, Philips G John. Pictorial Astronomy. United States: Sidney Feinberg, 1963.
Nebula that was destroyed after it’s sun went supernova. Troubled by his findings, the priest
The Orion Nebula is one of the closest stellar regions to the Earth. Using parallax measurements, it has been estimated that this nebula is only 1,500 light years away. In addition, the Orion Nebula is a relatively young star cluster, with an approximate age of less than one million years. It has even been speculated that some of the younger stars within the cluster are only 300,000 years old.
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.
I was born with an inherent fascination for all things celestial. Ever since I was young, I have been staring at the night sky trying to find constellations, or using my juvenile imagination to create my own. My efforts to find, view, and mentally catalogue everything the heavenly bodies have to offer has led me to employ some over-the-top measures, but the most extreme of them all might be the night I stayed awake through the wee hours of the morning to catch a glimpse of a meteor shower. Over the course of an entire year, the memory of this stupefying event is still as lucent and vivid as it was that very night so long ago.
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
Research News Planetary Scientists are Seeing the Unseeable Richard A. Kerr Science, New Series, Vol. 235, No. 2 -. 4784. The. Jan. 2, 1987, pp. 113-117. 29-31. The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'. Stable URL:
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...
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.
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.
The idea behind the Solar Nebular Hypothesis is that the solar system was condensed from an enormous cloud of hydrogen, helium, and a few other elements and rocks. Around five billion years this cloud of materials began to spin and contract together into a disk shape under their own gravitational forces. The particles started combined together, protoplanets, to eventually form planets. A great mass of the material eventually began to form together, protosun, and make up the sun.