10 Views From Space Are Out Of This World

Nebula's

A Nebular is an interstellar cloud in outer space made up of dust, hydrogen, helium gas and plasma. These clouds are formed when portions of the interstellar medium collapses and clump together due to the gravitational attraction of the particles that comprises them.

Space isn’t quite an empty vacuum; there are gasses and clouds of dust and each particle has a gravitational force relative to the proportion of its mass. The more that clumps together the larger the gravitational attraction, as more clumps together to form a larger and larger structure, the pressure inside increases and once this is high enough, nuclear fusion begins resulting in the emission of high energy electromagnetic radiation, which then in turn ionizes the outer layers of gas.

More info: 1staerials.co.uk

This Nebula is so large that both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mosaic II Camera on Earth had to be used to capture a complete view. The Helix Nebula is a planetary nebula, the glowing gaseous envelope expelled by a dying, sun-like star. The Helix resembles a simple doughnut as seen from Earth, but new evidence suggests that the Helix consists of two gaseous disks nearly perpendicular to each other.

Distance: 690 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius

This intense image shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen gas and small amounts of other elements such as oxygen and sulphur. This image captures a small region within M17, a hotbed of star formation.

The wave-like patterns of gas have been sculpted and illuminated by a torrent of ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars, which lie outside the image to the upper left. The glow of these patterns accentuates the three-dimensional structure of the gases. The ultraviolet radiation is carving and heating the surfaces of cold hydrogen gas clouds. The warmed surfaces glow orange and red in this photograph. The intense heat and pressure cause some material to stream away from those surfaces, creating the glowing veil of even hotter greenish gas that masks background structures. The pressure on the tips of the waves may trigger new star formation within them.

Distance: 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

An image from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes looks more like an abstract painting than a cosmic snapshot. The image shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colours.

At the heart is a set of four monstrously massive stars, collectively called the Trapezium. These behemoths are approximately 100,000 times brighter than our sun and can be identified as the yellow smudge near the centre of the composite.

This image is a false-colour composite, in which light detected at wavelengths of 0.43, 0.50, and 0.53 microns is blue. Light with wavelengths of 0.6, 0.65, and 0.91 microns is green. Light of 3.6 microns is orange, and 8-micron light is red.

Distance: 1,500 light-years away from Earth in the Orion nebula.

This is a mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054.

The orange filaments are the remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the centre of the nebula is the dynamo powering the nebula's interior bluish glow. The blue light comes from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic field lines from the neutron star.

Distance: 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

The Mystic Mountain captures the chaotic activity atop a mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. The top of a three-light-year tall pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas that stream from the peaks.

Distance: 7500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina.

An image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope image of a stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, located in the heart of the Tarantula Nebula. The nebula resides 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

Collectively, the stars in this image are millions of times more massive than our Sun. The image is roughly 650 light-years across and contains some rambunctious stars, from one of the fastest rotating stars to the speediest and most massive runaway star.

Distance: 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

The Horsehead Nebula as shown in infrared wavelength, the nebula appears transparent and ethereal, represented here with visible shades. The rich tapestry of the Horsehead Nebula pops out against the backdrop of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies that are easily seen in infrared light.

Distance: 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Orion.

The Eagle Nebula boasts this eerie dark pillar like structure, are columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also the incubators for new stars.

They are a part of the Eagle Nebula and as the pillars themselves are slowly eroded away by the ultraviolet light, small globules of even denser gas buried within the pillars are uncovered. These globules have been dubbed "EGGs." Or "Evaporating Gaseous Globules’’.

Distance: 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.

The sparkling centrepiece of Hubble's silver anniversary fireworks is a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund, who discovered the grouping in the 1960s.

Distance: 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

The Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant captures in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. This debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants covering a staggering 110 light-years across.

Distance: 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.