Latest Nebula Stories
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Observatory (ESO) taken by its Wide Field Imager shows off a section of the Seagull Nebula. The cloud of dust and glowing gas seen in the image that forms the "wings" of the seagull reveals a mix of dark and glowing red clouds. The Seagull Nebula, or IC 2177, lies between the constellations of Canis Major and Monoceros in the southern sky. Astronomers refer to...
[ Watch the Video: A Microquasar Makes a Giant Manatee Nebula ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Thanks to a powerful National Science Foundation (NSF) telescope and an observation made by one National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) official, the W50 nebula located approximately 18,000 light years away has a new name – the Manatee Nebula. Images of the massive supernova remnant captured recently by the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA)...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. In the essence of the Christmas spirit, ESA describes the cosmic structure of the eruption as a "giant and brightly colored ribbon in space." The structure visible within NGC 5189 is particularly dramatic, and the space agencies said the image is the most detailed yet image of this object. Planetary...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A little over 400 years ago, French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc first discovered the "fog" that is the Orion nebula. Located a mere 1,500 light years from our solar system, the Orion nebula is one of the great wonders of the night sky whose discovery is intimately associated with the early development of telescopes. Scientists have only realized the importance of the nebula in the last 60 years: the Orion nebula, like...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] | Video 3 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered a pair of stars orbiting each other at the center of a remarkable example of a planetary nebula. The latest find confirms a theory about what controls the spectacular and symmetric appearance of the material flung out into space. Planetary nebulae are glowing shells of gas around white dwarfs, and Fleming 1 is considered a great example that has strikingly...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has created a sweeping new survey of dying stars – or planetary nebula – in the neighborhood of the Sun. The resulting X-ray images shed light on the violent "end game" of a Sun-like star's life. Led by Joel Kastner from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the team won seven days of observation time with Chandra in 2011-2012 to survey and image...
Watch the Video: [ Zooming in on the Seagull Nebula ] Watch the Video: [ Panning Across the Head of the Seagull Nebula ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image taken by the European Space Observatory's La Silla Observatory shows off a stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula. This nebula looks like the head of the seagull, and glows brightly due to the energetic radiation from a hot young star that sits at its heart. Nebulae are interstellar...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online [ Watch the Video: Zooming in on the Pencil Nebula ] It seems a little early to already start decorating for Halloween, but the European Space Observatory has decided that it's never too early for a nebula shaped like a witch's broom. A new image of the Pencil Nebula shows a cloud of glowing gas making up part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago. ESO has...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA has released a hauntingly beautiful composite image showing a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A superbubble is a cavity, filled with 106 Kelvin gas blown into the interstellar medium by multiple supernovae and stellar winds, hundreds of light years across. These cavities are carved out of the surrounding gas by the...
Watch the Video: Simulation of Star Clusters Encounter Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has been keeping its eyes fixed on two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The star clusters are about 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. What was thought to have been just one cluster in the star-forming region commonly referred to as the...
Latest Nebula Reference Libraries
Supernova Remnant -- A supernova remnant (SNR) is made up of the materials left behind by the gigantic explosion of a star in a supernova. There are two possible routes to this end: either a massive star may cease to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapse inward under the force of its own gravity, or a white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a similar collapse. In either case, the resulting supernova...
Star -- A star is a self-gravitating sphere of plasma in hydrostatic equilibrium that generates energy in its interior through the process of nuclear fusion. Energy from this process radiates into space as electromagnetic radiation and neutrinos. Star formation and evolution As learned by star formation astronomers, stars are born in molecular clouds, regions of higher density of matter, and form by gravitational instability inside those clouds. High mass stars illuminate powerfully...
Reflection Nebula -- In astronomy, reflection nebulae are clouds of dust which are simply reflecting the light of a nearby star or stars. The nearby star or stars are not hot enough to cause ionization in the gas of the nebula like in emission nebulae but are bright enough to give sufficient scattering to make the dust visible. The distiction between these two types of nebulae was done by Hubble in 1922. They are usually blue because the scattering is more efficient for blue light...
Planetary Nebula -- A planetary nebula is an astronomical object that usually appears nebulous and disk-like in low-resolution observations. Because of this appearance, similar to the appearance of planets in early observations, the "planetary" adjective was attached and has since been retained for historical consistency. According to current observations and models, planetary nebulae in fact have little to do with planets. Instead, as a small star (less than a few times the mass...
Nebula -- in astronomy, observed manifestation of a collection of highly rarefied gas and dust in interstellar space. Prior to the 1960s this term was also applied to bodies later discovered to be galaxies, e.g., the so-called Great Nebula in the constellation Andromeda. In 1864, William Huggins confirmed William Herschel's conclusion that nebulae are not swarms of stars by determining that the spectra of nebulae are made of bright lines characteristic of radiating gases. Diffuse...
![Gyulbudaghian\](/media/gallery/universe/thumbs/thumbs_iod-universe-050913.jpg "Gyulbudaghian\")
