M8 - The Lagoon Nebula and Space Tornadoes - Deep Sky Videos

today we are looking at Messier 8 just also known as the Lagoon Nebula what I like about this is first of all it was just lots and lots of pretty pictures to show that's what I'm gonna be doing today I'm going to be showing all these beautiful pictures and talking about what's inside them but it just encapsulates for me just how unique this catalog is the messiyah catalog is not a catalog of objects that share a certain characteristic it's a catalog of objects that aren't something they're all the things that Messi didn't want to get distracted by when he was looking for his comets which means over the years we've talked about many many different kinds of objects often we're talking about star clusters or galaxies but today I'm talking about this big beautiful emission nebula Messier 8 has the distinction of being one of two emission nebulae that we can actually see with our naked eye it's not easy to do so particularly this one because it's in the constellation Sagittarius so from where we are here in Nottingham in the Northern Hemisphere it's only just creeping up above the horizon at certain points of year the other nebula of course is the great nebula in Orion which you can see with your naked eye under very good circumstances so I'll show you a very wide field view so what you're seeing here is m8 you see the background star field of the Milky Way you see another Messier object so go and check out the video for m20 which is the colorful trifid nebula and then this is this particular picture you see something else which is a nice little visitor you see Mars right in the center Mars just happened to pass through the field of view at the time that this picture was taken so this object is about 5,000 light years away and if you were to look at it on the sky and see it in its full extent it would be about three times the diameter of the full moon so an angular size it's really really big in physical size it's maybe about 50 by a hundred light years so that that's still fairly hefty as well it's a stellar nursery so it's got all the raw materials to form young stars the reason it glows is that it's full of ionized hydrogen so there's so much radiation from the hot young stars that are being born that the height atoms have actually had their electrons stripped off them when these atoms recombine they remit that light and that's what we see here encoded in this sort of red pink glow if we zoom in even closer we see the structure start to pop out so supposedly it's known as the Lagoon Nebula because of this dark patch of dust that falls around it in reality of course this is a three-dimensional shape you can see where stars have been formed because there's a young cluster down here and you can also see that sort of cavities are being excavated by the radiation and the stellar winds the intense wind of charged particles that are flying out of these hot young stars and in fact they're sort of gouging out a hole from the inside out but leaving this dusty material that hasn't quite been affected now only a few weeks ago as I sit here filming this now the Hubble Space Telescope chose m8 as the target for an anniversary image so they released an anniversary image celebrating 28 years of operation of this phenomenal telescope and when you zoom into the center of this region and you you can't even see it on this image because it's so washed out by all the radiation here but if I replace this now with the heart of this nebula it's essentially a work of art it's very similar to the very iconic image of the Eagle Nebula which was one of the most famous images the pillars of creation that Hubble produced but this is a different object in its own right so now we're looking at the heart of the nebula this little bit here this little bright patch is known as the hourglass nebula for reasons that I actually can see for once this bright point in the center is Herschel 36 this is a hot young star young in astronomical terms means it's only 1 million years old and it's very massive which means it's very bright so it's many times more massive than the Sun it's about 200 times brighter than the Sun so this hot young star is pumping out all this radiation it's physically changed the surrounding medium its producing radiation that's lighting up this nebula and making this really really beautiful picture here but there's two more things in this image that I wanted to point out because I think they're really neat the first is you can see these very dark features here and in particular if you focus your attention on this here this is a great name this is called a buck globule it's named after an astronomer bark block this is really the stellar cocoon this is where we think individual stars not a big cluster of stars but one or two or three stars are being formed remember how hostile this environment is it's full of radiation it's full of charged particles eroding all of this material away but right in the center of these globules you've got a very very cold molecular cloud it's cold it's gravitationally collapsing it's not collapsed enough to form a protostar to heat it up so it's really one of the coldest objects in the universe it's about maybe 10 Kelvin there's a 10 degrees above absolute zero and it's full of molecular hydrogen so rather than the ionized hydrogen I spoke of earlier it's molecular hydrogen and that's going to collapse and form a star visible and ultraviolet light can't penetrate these objects because they're so cold and so dense but we may have insight into seeing inside them using infrared telescopes in particular James Webb in the future may be sensitive to the very trace amounts of heat and thermal radiation signifying the birth of young stars inside these cocoons now the final thing that I want to talk about because this is just really cool if space tornadoes okay and if you look right down into the middle here you can see these sort of twisty bits of material connecting these two sides the nebula these are actually swirling clouds of material so they're forming due to wind shears in these stellar winds so there's a temperature gradient in the material the surface of these clouds are getting very hot because they're being radiated from from these hot young stars the interior is very cold and so there's a temperature gradient and a wind which causes motion and you actually literally get these swirling space tornadoes that are maybe about half a Lightyear across which i think is pretty neat so all in all it's a very busy area it's full of interesting physics and it's full of just aesthetic beauty and you can see right away why Hubble would have chosen it to be the subject of such a special anniversary portrait it's actually got masses of technical detail in it so the idea of actually transcribing some of this stuff you know you've got tables so here's a whole table of positions and magnitudes of stars for example and they've got all their positions and how bright they are on the sky pages and pages of this stuff

Channel: DeepSkyVideos

Views: 43,541

Rating: 4.9653115 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, messier 8, lagoon nebula

Id: PmND3stF1Hg

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018