Home > Nebulae > Diffuse Nebulae |
Diffuse Nebula
General Information
-
Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium gas.
-
Over the course of a few hundred thousand or a few million years the cloud will break up into 100 200 smaller clouds and each of these smaller clouds will become a star.
-
These clouds contain very little matter compared to the amount of space they take up. In fact they are a better vacuum than any vacuum we can make on Earth.
-
If you take a piece of this nebula that is the size of the Earth, all the material in that piece will fill a thimble.
-
If you blow up a balloon one foot across, it contains as much air (matter) as these clouds contain in a box that is 500 thousand miles on each side.
-
The sun formed out of a cloud similar to this one about 5 billion years ago.
-
Diffuse Nebulae are emission nebulae.
a. Young, hot stars in the nebula heat up the gas in the nebula.
b. The heated gas emits light.
Home > Nebulae > Diffuse Nebulae > References |
References
Item | Updated | Notes |
Last Reviewed | 2003-01-13 | http://messier.seds.org/diffuse.html |