Image Of The Tarantula Nebula Makes Me Shoot Web.

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Behold the Tarantula Nebulae, who is absolutely stunning. The nebulae, which is located a mere 170,000 light years away is a hotbed of star-creating majesty.

Bad Astronomy:

This area is a mess. The gas and dust are obvious enough, as are the great number of stars littering that volume of space. Quite a few of the stars you see there are newborns. But note the tendrils and filaments of gas to the left of center, and to a lesser extent to the upper right. Those are the shock-wave compressed sheets of gas from a supernova, a star that exploded right in the center of all that. A massive star must have formed here, lived out its short life, and detonated. The debris expanded at thousands of kilometers per second, slamming into and compressing the gas. It wouldn’t surprise me if this expanding debris helped collapse more gas at its outer edges, helping more stars get born.

It’s the circle of life, or I guess, in this case, it’s the spherical shell of life.

To say this region is vast is seriously underestimating it. Astronomers are actually arguing not that it’s forming stars, but that it may be forming  a nascent globular cluster, a collection of hundreds of thousands or even million of stars!

A region that has a collection of hundreds of thousands or millions of stars. I need some sort of neural interface upgrade so I can do common geometry, let alone comprehend the vastness of this shit. My fat gummy primordial brainpieces, they chug with  deliberation. I can’t, I can’t grasp it.