NASAs stunning video of the Lagoon Nebula will put your life in perspective

[Soph0571]

In case you thought your problems were of any significance whatsoever, a new NASA video of the Lagoon Nebula is here to remind you that they absolutely are not.

[link:https://qz.com/1258283/nasas-stunning-video-of-the-lagoon-nebula-will-put-your-dumb-life-in-perspective/|

Awe Inspiring in the true sense of the word...

[mcar]

1. Stunning!

[JHB]

2. As the good book said...

Space is big. Really big.

[edhopper]

4. That was a really good book.

Don't Panic

[JHB]

5. Always know where your towel is.

[edhopper]

7. I actually

always keep a towel in my car.

[jeffreyi]

20. And the answer is...

43? Wait...

[edhopper]

22. Sure

but what is the Question?

[ProudLib72]

41. What is six times nine? nt

[paleotn]

15. .....

I still miss Adams. A true genius.

[raven mad]

25. So long

and thanks for all the fish.

(May not be the right book, but I always loved that title........)

[Wounded Bear]

55. It is one of the 5 volumes in the trilogy...

[raven mad]

57. Well, heck - that Zaphod Beeblebrox is almost sTrumpet-like.

But we Dems know the answer is 42.

Don't forget your towel!

[muriel_volestrangler]

60. From the actors who play Beeblebrox and Arthur Dent:

Both actors noticed similarities between the President of the Universe and another modern day president. Mark Wing-Davey points out “Zaphod has a narcissism that reminds me rather of the current guy who is the president of the United States." Simon Jones adds to this: "Douglas was a little bit of a prophet there. Little did he know there would be a real life Zaphod Beeblebrox.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4lVZcX2xDThMtL0V4LzsW0s/the-recording-at-the-end-of-the-universe

[raven mad]

61. LOL! Perfect! I never saw the video/movie -

and still love it when anyone has a comeback for Douglas Adams's novels! The movie is on IMDB now, maybe I'll take the time!

Mark Wing-Davie, YOU get the for pure insight!

OMG - and Ford Prefect.................... and that'll teach YOU to put a planet in the way of an interstellar highway..........

SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO??? Now I have to go dig out all the books and I don't know which box they're in (we moved recently).

[muriel_volestrangler]

62. I suspect you can't listen to them, but the BBC just broadcast a radio adaptation of the 6th book

ie Eoin Colfer's "And Another Thing" (not as good as Adams, but still, it's there) which was what they were recording. And they are broadcasting the 1st 2 radio series. See if you can listen to them at this link:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03v379k/episodes/player

[FM123]

3. Wow

I often find myself saying "Oh my stars!" about one stupid thing or another, but in this case...
Oh my stars!

[edhopper]

6. Millions of stars

with millions of planets, with perhaps, untold numbers of lifeforms.
I wonder if Jesus died for there sins too?

[paleotn]

16. sins? what sins?

Oh, damn! That's right! I shouldn't have had that barbecue last night. Damn those pigs! They're so tasty.

[edhopper]

23. A million billion stars

and God wants to know if you touch yourself.

[erronis]

30. But god touches everyone, right? Just friendly or perversion?

I so want to die a blasphemer against any/all religions. If someone notices that I have agreed to some "final rites", throw me in the sewer.

[lastlib]

43. "My Stars! It's full of God!".................

[edhopper]

44. favorite movie

[lastlib]

58. (Mine, too!)

--

[NurseJackie]

8. The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light-years from the Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagoon_Nebula

Characteristics

The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light-years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90' by 40', which translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years. Like many nebulas, it appears pink in time-exposure color photos but is gray to the eye peering through binoculars or a telescope, human vision having poor color sensitivity at low light levels. The nebula contains a number of Bok globules (dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material), the most prominent of which have been catalogued by E. E. Barnard as B88, B89 and B296. It also includes a funnel-like or tornado-like structure caused by a hot O-type star that emanates ultraviolet light, heating and ionizing gases on the surface of the nebula. The Lagoon Nebula also contains at its centre a structure known as the Hourglass Nebula (so named by John Herschel), which should not be confused with the better known Hourglass Nebula in the constellation of Musca. In 2006 the first four Herbig–Haro objects were detected within the Hourglass, also including HH 870. This provides the first direct evidence of active star formation by accretion within it.[2]

[Blue_true]

35. If a star is sending energy into the nebula.

Couldn't that be evidence of a high energy particle strike mechanism for triggering cloud collapse to form stars? Radiation emitted by some stars is capable of setting off cosmic particles, which in theory could strike clouds of hydrogen and dust material any induce fusion, which would subsequently draw in mass and more cosmic particles as a charge imbalance develops within the struck region of the cloud.

[NurseJackie]

37. Sounds logical to me.

[TheBlackAdder]

9. How many days does it take to walk across it :-D

[onethatcares]

12. Don't know but I would

thoroughly hydrate before and while on the excursion.

Take some trail mix snacking, something high in protein.

[Blue_true]

34. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles.

That nebula is huge in terms of distance.

[malaise]

10. Magnificent

Thank You

Rec

[bronxiteforever]

11. Kick and recommend. Beautiful.

[dchill]

13. Uh, words.

[LongTomH]

14. Thank you for posting this!!!

We can get many things from viewing the lovely video: We can marvel at the wonder of the universe; we can put our Earthly problems in perspective; we can understand that even stars are born and die, which can help us accept our own mortality; or we can just enjoy the beauty of the fantastic nebula.

[BobTheSubgenius]

17. I just love these presentations!

Thank you for this one.

[Plucketeer]

18. As more and more of the universe is revealed and detailed to us

it serves to show us just HOW insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. And I - not having a god to park my fears with - am perfectly fine with the idea that I'm really no more, nor less, influential to the universe than the best or worst that humanity has to offer.

[misanthrope]

45. The best thing that could happen to our biosphere and species

would be the ability for every human alive to leave the planet and spend a small amount of time at least in near-Earth orbit. The effects of such have been noted going back to the 1960s.

Overview Effect

[zanana1]

19. The universe is so beautiful.

It must contain more than we'll ever know.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. This thread is a Total Perspective Vortex!

Take it away, Douglas Adams:

The Vortex derives its picture of the whole universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the universe is in someway affected by every other piece of matter in the universe, it is, in theory, possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history, from, say - one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so, basically, in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula, for that was his name, was a dreamer, a speculative thinker, or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he would spend staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. “Have some sense of proportion,” she would say, thirty-eight times a day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her. And in one end he plugged the whole of reality, as extrapolated from a fairy cake, and in the other end he plugged his wife - so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock annihilated her brain. But to his satisfaction, he realised he had conclusively proved that if life is going to exist in a universe this size, the one thing it cannot afford to have, is a sense of proportion.

http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/THHGTTG/THHGTTGradio8.htm

[longship]

27. Douglas Adams is desperately missed.

Thanks for the Total Perspective Vortex clip.

[Anon-C]

26. The nebula is amazing and so is it's environment, that blue-white star...

...not much on it...likely the brightest star of NGC 6530:

http://www.messier.seds.org/xtra/ngc/n6530.html

"Its brightest star is a 6.9 mag hot O5 star, and Eichler gives its age as 2 million years. Woldemar Götz mentions this cluster as containing one peculiar Of star, an extremely hot bright star of spectral type O with peculiar spectral lines of ionized Helium and Nitrogen."

[longship]

28. O, B, A, F, G, K, M are the stellar spectral classes from hottest to coolest, more massive to less.

Sol is a G-class star. By far, most stars are small, cool M-class red dwarfs.

The lifetimes of stars is shortest the more massive and hot they are, and longest the smaller and cooler. The lifetime of a red dwarf is likely trillions of years, an O-class star only a few million years, Sol maybe 10 billion or so years.

(For people's information.)

[Blue_true]

36. The theory is that very large stars explode into supernova

once they grow pass a specific mass. But the largest star and hottest ever found is around 1 million times the mass of the Sun. Is it possible that the black holes at the center of galaxies are actually hyper massive stars that have an outside galaxy origin?

[longship]

39. Probably not

The super massive black holes at the center of galaxies are millions or billions of solar mass. There are no stars that massive anywhere. Stars that large are in principle not theoretically possible.

[Blue_true]

49. Not within a galaxy.

But I specifically asked whether stars that are formed in the universe proper could become massive enough to be Galaxy core black holes. If you think about how star systems and galaxies work, one thing that pops out is the repeating pattern of revolution around a core, a star sits at the core of it's star system, a black hole sits at the core of galaxies. The Galaxy core regulated the formation and size of stars within a galaxy, with none being more massive than the core. Mentally extrapolating, I can envision how a universe core can produce massive stars that become Galaxy core. But, then again, maybe I am off my rocker.

[longship]

40. The large stars go supernova when their cores can no longer gain energy from fusion.

That happens when their cores fuse to iron from which fusion is no longer exothermic, so to speak. Further fusion is blocked and the core gravitationally collapses producing a supernova.

Iron is the end of the fusion line.

[Blue_true]

50. Maybe I am wrong.

But I think that I read where some stars were found with elements more massive that Iron. But you are right, the theory on supernova formation is that a massive star stops fusing elements at it's core and as a result, no longer creates radiation that push outward and counteracts it's inward gravitational pull, so the star collapse under the force of it's own gravity. The Sun isn't considered massive enough to go supernova because it can't fuse anything larger than Helium at some point. The theory is that the Sun will use up all Hydrogen within it and expand to become a red giant as it fuses Helium (and coincidentally, destroy the Earth and every terrestrial planet), one the Helium is spent after many billions of years, the Sun will shed mass to the Galaxy to become a white dwaft star and it cools toward nothing.

[ProudLib72]

42. We must enjoy the Stelliferous Era while it lasts!

I'm so not looking forward to the Degenerate Era.

[longship]

46. How about the black hole era?

Everybody must get spaghettified!!

[ProudLib72]

47. I will have given up by that point

On the other hand, falling into a black hole might just be the most exciting end anyone could ever hope for...at least for the first couple of days.

[Blue_true]

52. We would never know what hit us.

Imagine an airplane flying trillions of miles per hour having a decompression. We would be instantaneously vaporized, before we could even recognize what is happening. Nice to give you such a joyous thought on such a beautiful Sunday morning.

[The_jackalope]

51. Oh be a fine girl, kiss me...

The mnemonic for the main sequence stars.

[longship]

53. Or, Oh Be A Fine Guy Kiss Me.

You choose.

[The_jackalope]

54. I'll take "Gremlin" for $1000, Alex...

[LuvLoogie]

29. Cool video, but I could do without the entitled snarkiness of the writer at the linked site.

[Delphinus]

31. Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,

needed this right now. Beautiful!

Thank you!

[calimary]

32. Daaaaaang...

Stunning!

Quite literally out of this world!

[oswaldactedalone]

33. Is this a scene

Stanley Kubrick left out of 2001?

[calikid]

38. Thanks soph, this thread rates as one of the best!

Whoda thunk I could learnt so much, an laff to

[Cha]

48. Beautiful, Mahalo, Soph!

[Wwcd]

56. A magnificent view to start my day!

Thanks Soph0571

Its a perfect get-a-way to clear the mind & recenter our purpose.

I'll refer to it often, I'm sure.

[Demovictory9]

59. beautiful!