The Clouds of creation
"We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
- Carl Sagan
A twinkling night sky is something that motivates everyone, regardless of their age, gender, religion, nationality etc. Although not scientifically proven, there's a connection every human on this planet have made with the celestial bodies. Today there are very few things that brings all of us together and surely a dark night sky full of stars is one of them. And why wouldn't anyone be mesmerised by it, afterall the cosmos is from where we have come to this temporary home, called Earth, and the cosmos is where our future and destiny lies. But before we start talking about other things in the universe, it is important to understand the process of creation (we will talk about destruction in some later post). How is the cycle of universe initiated in the first place? In this post we will be talking about Nebula, large clouds of dust and matter, usually a remenant from the explosion of a star and how does it play an important role in the functioning of universe.
 |
| Image of Eagle Nebula (7000 ly) from Hubble Space Telescope Source: https://spacetelescope.org/images/heic0506b/ |
According to the definition, a nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Some nebulae come from gas and dust thrown out by a dying star. Other nebulae are the regions where new stars are beginning to form. So whenever a giant star completely exhausts its fuel (Hydrogen), it starts fusing Helium atoms to form further heavier elements. A point is reached when this star can no longer carry out nuclear fusion to support its surface from collapsing due to its tremendous gravity and thus it explodes, throwing off huge amount of matter in the interstellar space. Thus, a giant cloud is formed, enriched with minerals and compounds, sometimes even water and thus a Nebula is formed. We have sighted many nebulae in our galaxy and these spectacular masterpieces are true wonders with absolute beauty.
But the question remains; how can we correlate this to creation? Isn't a cosmic explosion bad? Well, a cosmic explosion is extremely disastrous only when you are too close to it. Once the powerful radiations from the Supernova lose their energy it's not harmful. Now coming to creation; the gases and dust from the supernova carry a tiny mass. The gravitational forces then starts to take control of these scattered matter and tries to condense the substance at one place. Thus we have a formation of clouds which may or may not be static. Many times, the clouds become so dense that a nuclear fusion process starts within the nebula itself, giving rise to many tiny nuclear fusion cores; the second generation of twinkling stars are thus formed. At the same time there are gases and dusts from supernova which are thrown far away, like a giant globe of explosion and cannot condense to form clouds. What happens to such matter then? Guess what, this mineral rich (which may also contain water!) globe of explosion keeps on travelling the interstellar space for billions of years until one fine day these get deposited on a prefect newly born planet of a newly born solar system and this is how ladies and gentlemen, planets get minerals and water on their surface. We don't need to talk about what wonders water has brought about, as far as evolution of life on this planet is concerned, everyone knows it!
Where can we find a nebula? Is it visible to the naked eyes? There are more than 3,000 nebulae in our galaxy alone which means nebulae can be found all across our galaxy, however these mostly occur near the centre of Milky Way. There are even some which can be observed in the night sky without any equipments. Below show are the images of Orion nebula, which is 1,400 light years away from us. The image on the left is taken by Hubble space telescope and the one on the right (enclosed in a green circle) is taken by me on my cellphone. Also, if you point your telescope, you will see tiny brightly coloured dots which are nothing but newly born stars 1,400 years ago, that is, the light you see now was emitted during the time when Mayans were building the Pyramids and Vikings were on a conquest of Ireland!
 |
| Orion Nebula (1400 ly) Source: https://spacetelescope.org/images/heic0601a/ |
 | ||
|
There is a lot to know about these wonders and surely these deserve our special attention, afterall this is where we came from. We are all made up of star dust, our past and our future lies above in the outerspace. We mustn't assume ourselves to be caretakers but explorers. In the end we are just little beings on this tiny blue dot which itself is a part of much richer Universe.
Comments
Post a Comment