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Diffuse Nebula

General Information

  1. Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium gas.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. The sun formed out of a cloud similar to this one about 5 billion years ago.

  7. 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.

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References
Item Updated Notes
Last Reviewed 2003-01-13 http://messier.seds.org/diffuse.html