Nov 22, 2024, 06:44 AM IST
A famous example of an emission nebula is the Orion Nebula, a huge, star-forming nebula in the constellation Orion.
A reflection nebula called NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth.
When astronomers looked at the sky through early telescopes, they found many indistinct, cloudy forms. They called such objects "nebulae," Latin for clouds.
Not all stars die gently, exhaling their outer layers into space. Some explode in a supernova, flinging their contents into space at anywhere from 9,000 to 25,000 miles (15,000 to 40,000 kilometers) per second.
Absorption nebulae or dark nebulae are clouds of gas and dust that don’t emit or reflect light, but block light coming from behind them.
A dusty bright nebula contrasts dramatically with a dusty dark nebula in this Hubble Space Telescope image.
In NGC 2313, pictured here, the bright star V565 (center of the image) highlights a silvery veil of gas and dust, while the right half of this image is obscured by a dense cloud of dust
Caldwell 99 is a dark nebula — a dense cloud of interstellar dust that completely blocks out visible wavelengths of light from objects behind it
The aptly named Pillars of Creation, featured in these stunning Hubble images, are part of an active star-forming region within the nebula and hide newborn stars in their wispy columns
The Crab Nebula, imaged here by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, is powered by a quickly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star called a pulsar, which was formed when a massive star ran out of its nuclear fuel and collapsed