WHAT IS A NEBULA?

Nebula is a Latin word meaning ‘cloud’; its plural form is nebulae, and it stands for clouds of gas and dust located inside our galaxy.

There are several different types of nebulae. Most nebulae consist primarily of gas that is able to glow with its own light, creating the colourful displays we’re familiar with. But other nebulae are much dustier in their composition, and block the light from more distant objects beyond it.

Nebulae play a key role in the life cycle of stars, both at their birth and death. Stars are born in dense clumps of gas, dust, and other material inside diffuse emission nebulae, also frequently referred to as stellar nurseries. At the other end of a star’s life, we encounter another, rather different, type of emission nebula. Stars like the Sun end their lives as highly compact white dwarfs, but as they shrink down into this phase they release clouds of gas which form a so-called ‘planetary nebula’. Not all stars end their days in the relative serenity of a planetary nebula. A star that’s much more massive than the Sun will eventually explode as a supernova, and the debris flung out from that explosion forms yet another kind of nebula called a supernova remnant.