nebula

There's no question that young solar systems are chaotic places. Cascading collisions defined our young Solar System as rocks, boulders, and planetesimals repeatedly collided.A new study based on chunks of asteroids that crashed into Earth puts a timeline to some of that chaos.  Astronomers know that asteroids have remained essentially unchanged since their formation in the early Solar System billions of years ago.They're like rocky time capsules that contain scientific clues from that important epoch because…

There are millions of stars visible in a clear night sky. From Earth, they appear like tiny dots sparkling for no explained reason. But there's one star at the centre of our existence, which burns itself to support life. It's the Sun, around which several planets, including the Earth, revolves. Now, imagine a star that is 200,000 times brighter and 32 times more massive than our Sun. NASA has recently shared an image that showed what a world around this star would look like. The image featured a cosmic landscape that…

A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas occupying the space between stars. We have seen many images of different kinds of nebulae, thanks to the observatories scientists have made over the years. Now, can you imagine how these cosmic clouds appear when interpreted as sound? NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope has shared a video on Instagram that shows sonification of data of Cat's Eye nebula captured by it and the agency's Chandra X-ray observatory. “Experience the Cat's Eye nebula through sound,” the post said.A planetary…

NASA has shared a stunning image of a “cosmic flower in bloom” on Instagram. The photograph showed a heavenly entity resembling a flower in the Ring Nebula, which is located about 2,000 light-years away from us, in the constellation Lyra. The image, which showed a halo around the planetary nebula appearing like floral petals, was captured by NASA's now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. The outer shell of this planetary nebula is formed from material ejected from a dying star, the space agency said.The Ring nebula, also…

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a grand view while exploring patches of the sky. In an infrared image captured by the telescope and posted on social media by NASA, we see a cosmic cloud that resembles a butterfly. But don't be fooled. This image is of a cluster of "baby stars", a nebula of new stars. The image shows huge red clouds of gas and dust where new stars may form. What looks like a butterfly's wings are actually giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas that are emanating from the hottest and most…