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This is M16, The Eagle Nebula. Stars form in the clouds of gas and dust you're looking at. The bright stars you see are baby new born stars, cool, eh? M16 is a large region of cosmic raw material for star formation. It's visible because about 2 million years ago it produced a cluster of bright stars , their light ionizes the nearby gas making it shine up. This cloud and others like it contain enough mass to make upwards of a hundred to a million stars the size of our sun or bigger. The diameters of clouds like these range from 50 to 200 LY. They're called clouds due to the coldness of their interior( they don't resemble earth clouds), temperatures of about 10 K(it's f**king cold ok). Most of their gas molecules are bound together in molecules due to the temperature(if you don't know chem, ask me, it's alittle much for this description page).
The m stands for Messier object. Messier is Charles messier, he cataloged a large number of nebulea, star clusters, and galaxies while searching for comets, which was his passion. Nebula is just a fancy word for a dust and gas cloud.
supernova 1987a
the orion nebula. The brightness in some areas is due to star formation. The orion Nebula can be found in obviously orion's belt. The horsehead nebula can also be found in orion's belt, these two nebula are the most famous parts of the orion belt. there is much star formation and interesting gas cloud shapes to be found in this particular region of the sky. At radio wavelegnths the belt is one huge cloud, with these being only a small part of it. The cloud is about 1500LY from here(earth), you can see this image above with a good pair of binoculars, it's in the middle of orion's sword. Most of the orion cloud does'nt shine brightly like this part above, it glows in different wavelegnths than visible light.But radio astronomers can see the whole thing in infrared and radio wavelegnths.Dispite the few stars seen here, there is actually thousands in the grouping of the cloud, they burn at a different wavelegnth and can't be seen visually. The entire orion cloud is about 100 Ly across and the total quantity of molecular gas is about 200,000 times the mass of our sun.The stars in the orion belt itself( the one you see with nekkid eyes) are about 8 million years old and the stars in the region above are around 300,000 years old. Compared to the Sun( ours) which is around 4.5 billion years old.These are young stars to say the least. For an attempt at perspective, when large mammels began walking on the earth after the dinosaurs were gone, these stars began forming.So, we're like great grandparents to the 10th power from them. not real dating material here.
These are from the hubble space telescope. Learn more about this magnificant human achievement at it's web site found at nasa.
