We’re not going to fly through a nebula
, not in the lifetimes of anyone alive today. Possibly not ever in anyone’s lifetime. But based on data from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, we now have a feel for what it may be like to fly through one of the most famous ones – the Orion nebula.
Can a spaceship fly through nebula?
The nearest bright nebula to us is around 695 light-years away, and the Orion nebula is much farther, around 1,344 light-years away. So even if we had light-speed travel,
it would take many generations aboard a generation ship to get there.
What would happen if I went into a nebula?
Can life exist inside of nebula?
Can a habitable world exist that would orbit in and out of a nebula?
The answer would be yes
. As the planet orbits its star that orbits the center of the galaxy, the planet and its star could enter a nebula and pass through that nebula for thousands or millions of years and then emerge on the other side of the nebula.
Can you fly through stars?
Traveling to the stars is very difficult because they are so far away
. The nearest star is 25,300,000,000,000 miles (about 39,900,000,000,000 kilometers) away. It would take the fastest rockets that we have thousands of years to reach it.
Is our solar system in a nebula?
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The cloud collapsed, possibly due to the shockwave of a nearby exploding star, called a supernova.
When this dust cloud collapsed, it formed a solar nebula
– a spinning, swirling disk of material.
Are nebulae hot?
The temperature of the gas in the nebula is about 10,000 degrees Celsius
, and the central stars of planetary nebulae are among the hottest stars in the Universe, with temperature in the range of 25,000 to over 200,000 degrees Celsius.
What type of nebula is the Orion Nebula?
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a
diffuse nebula
with a greenish hue and is situated below Orion’s Belt. It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky.
Can you see the Orion Nebula without a telescope?
Can I see it without a telescope?
The Orion Nebula can be seen with the naked eye as long as there isn’t too much light pollution
. It’s best to get away from any sources of artificial light, so a place like a field is ideal.
What does a nebula look like up close?
Can life exist without a planet?
Not only
may scientists someday find life without a home planet
, but the life on our world may owe its origins to the depths of interstellar space itself.
Is the earth in a nebula?
The Earth was formed from the nebula
that produced the Solar System. It is almost universally accepted that the Sun, the planets and their satellites, the asteroids, and the comets of the Oort ‘cloud’ grew from a cloud of gas and dust that contracted under its own gravity.
Can Milky Way galaxy be seen from Earth?
The Milky Way is visible from Earth as a hazy band of white light, some 30° wide, arching the night sky
. In night sky observing, although all the individual naked-eye stars in the entire sky are part of the Milky Way Galaxy, the term “Milky Way” is limited to this band of light.
What is the fastest humans can travel in space?
Nothing can travel faster than
300,000 kilometers per second
(186,000 miles per second).
Is interstellar possible?
It’s possible that, with enough power, we could even send a crew-carrying spacecraft to span the interstellar distances
. Sure, we’d have to build a tremendous laser array: about 100 square kilometers’ worth of lasers, and we’d have to do it in space, but that’s a problem of cost, not science or technology.
Will humans ever travel to other galaxies?
Unfortunately,
we’re unlikely to ever make contact with life in other galaxies
. Travel by spaceship to our closest intergalactic neighbor, the Canis Major Dwarf, would take almost 750,000,000 years with current technology. Even a radio signal, which moves at close to the speed of light, would take 25,000 years.
What do Protoplanets become?
As the protoplanets grew to become
planets
, parts of them melted due to radioactivity, gravitational influences, and collisions. Where the objects had melted, the composition of the planets changed. Heavier elements sank, forming the cores of the planets, and lighter objects rose to the surface.
What’s inside of a nebula?
Nebulae are made of
dust and gases—mostly hydrogen and helium
. The dust and gases in a nebula are very spread out, but gravity can slowly begin to pull together clumps of dust and gas. As these clumps get bigger and bigger, their gravity gets stronger and stronger.
Is every star a Sun?
Namely,
every Sun is a star, but not every star is a Sun
. The Sun is larger and as such a lot brighter than most stars. There are billions of Suns in our galaxy alone and as mentioned, many of the stars we see are also Suns. But many celestial objects you see when looking up are not stars.
Is a nebula bigger than a galaxy?
Simply put, the main difference between galaxies and nebulae are an extreme difference in size, as well as their basic structure. A nebula is a cloud of dust and gas, usually tens to hundreds of light years across.
A galaxy is much larger — usually thousands to hundreds of thousands of light years across.
How long do nebulas last?
250 years ago, astronomers thought they were looking at gas planets when they observed the colourful spectacle of planetary nebulae through their less powerful telescopes. Planetary nebulae only last for
about 20 000 years
, making them a very short-lived part of the stellar life cycle.
How old are nebulae?
Now we estimate its distance from us as somewhere around 1500 light years. This in turn puts our calculation of the distance it has expanded at a lower number (90 light years instead of 150), and thus dropped the estimated age of the nebula from 20,000 years to somewhere between
5000-8000 years old
!
Are nebulae actually colorful?
Most of the nebulae and galaxy photos are what we’d call false colour, yes
– although it’s probably much more fair to the people who make these images to call them “exaggerated colour”, or perhaps “reconstructed colour”.
Can we see nebula with our eyes?
Most nebulae – clouds of interstellar gas and dust – are difficult if not impossible to see with the unaided eye or even binoculars
. But the Orion Nebula is in a class nearly all by itself. It’s visible to the unaided eye on a dark, moonless night.
Is there a black hole in Orion?
A black hole in the Orion Nebula? An international team of astrophysicists says
the famous Orion Nebula has a black hole at its heart
, whose mass is some 200 times the mass of our sun.
