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Today's stunner from the Hubble Space Telescope shows clouds of gas and dust in the Lagoon Nebula, being sculpted by the intense radiation from hot young stars nearby. The nebula is so named because of a wide lagoon-shaped lane of dust at the heart of the star-forming region, 4,000 to 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The scene may look as placid as an earthly cloud at sunset on the first day of autumn ... but the Lagoon is actually a boiling sea of starbirth. Check out the European Space Agency's Hubble website for the full story, and don't miss this zoom-in video that shows you how to get from here to there. For more views of the cosmos, visit our Space Gallery.
Check out other postings on Cosmic Log and Photoblog ... and connect with Alan via Twitter (@b0yle) or Facebook.
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That's beautiful.
This is truly the stuff solar systems and worlds are made from. BEAUTIFUL!!!!
First steps - Explore, discover and utilize - Man's intelligence reason - Purpose, unknown.
Absolutely stunning. I found the zoom in video just amazing. The Hubble has always produced my favorite pictures. April 1997 issue of National Geographic. I still have it. The pictures we see from Hubble today are even more stunning and they never cease to amaze. (in April 1997 I was almost 16 years old). Man, how time flies.
I for one, would not be surprised to find that these major dust clouds, especially in the heavy dust lanes we find in many galaxies, held a wide variety of life forms adapted to living in the near vacuum using the dusts and gasses found therein as 'food' and utilizing starlight from the newer stars as their main energy source. Certainly I can foresee certain types of plant life and if there are plants one will tend to find animals that will feed on them as well. Seeing as how we do not even know what life forms inhabit our upper atmosphere this is not much of a stretch of the imagination. Life, as we have found, WILL inhabit any niche that has food and energy sources to utilize.
I too am constantly astounded by the pix that we get from the Hubble and it's sisters in space, the Spitzer and Chandra Space Telescopes, they keep opening up new frontiers for us to explore further and continually push the boundaries of old assumptions.
I agree I believe there are other things out there too. We exist in just one of many galaxies, How do any of us really know what is out there? I also think it looks like there are "creatures" in a lot of the pictures like these..and this one has a face like figure in the upper left...astonishing!
Ashley-2388740. There are more Important things to look into than that,there are no Creatures that we know of. But we know there are objects that can do change the Earth in ways that will cause events of Planet Earth and all other Planets or or Meteors but there are no creatures.
we wont know anything until we get there
Something that a lot of us forget is how recently witnessing these wonders was made possible. It wasn't long ago that humans could only dream of images like this.
This single image is sufficient to rebut the unimaginative grumblings of Luddites who wonder after the benefits of space exploration. Forgo investigation of this vast frontier? To what -- do explain, please -- better purpose?
Quantum cosmology as devastatingly detailed relief. This is the exact circumstance for which the word "awesome" ought to be reserved (with all due respect to the latest variation of chili-cheese fries)...
We chould already be there in person. Not just looking at pictures taken from a distance.
makes me want to be a space miner lol