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Ever wondered where stars are made? Well, now you are about to find out! Just where these hot balls of gas start their lives begins in what astronomers call a nebula (plural: nebulae) and they are basically the nurseries of the Universe. Do you remember when your parents first took you to nursery? Do you remember what it was like?
nebula is a gigantic cloud of dust and gas; mainly of hydrogen and helium gases, and they can be light years across - that’s trillions of miles - imagine how many nurseries you can fit into one of these ginormous star factories! Secondly, they look quite fuzzy in appearance - pretty much like fluffy clouds or cotton wool in the sky.(lol)
It wasn’t until astronomer Edwin Hubble decided to tackle that particular subject that he managed to resolve individual stars in a spiral nebulae. The Andromeda Nebulae turned out to be the Andromeda Galaxy! These weren’t mere gas clouds, but actual galaxies just like our own.
Our understanding of the size of the Universe jumped many orders of magnitude that day! We now know there are at least 100 billion other galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars; we know that most stars have planets, if we understand stellar formation correctly. That’s a lot of planets where life might exist. And all that came from studying nebulae.