We can all work hard to upload the best photos to Instagram. But let’s be honest with ourselves: we can hardly match The NASA. His space images are so amazing that they often go viral. The last to reach this position has been a photograph of the lagoon nebulawhich has already exceeded 1.3 million likes in the social network. The snapshot draws attention by itself, but even more so for recalling some images of The Guardians of the Galaxyfrom Marvel.
The NASA image was published on May 18 and has generated a lot of expectation. In fact, in addition to that large number of likesat the time this article was written I already had more than 3,000 comments.
In the description of the photo, NASA talks a little about this Photography captured by veteran Hubble. Although the truth is that to see the lagoon nebula Sometimes just looking at the sky is enough. On August nights, in sufficiently dark and clear skies it can be seen, although only in shades of grey. To see it in all its colorful splendor we have space telescopes and space agencies such as NASA, which are responsible for making its photographs visible to the public.
“Although it may appear to be a serene cosmic landscape, the Lagoon Nebula is filled with turbulent gases, roaring stellar winds and intense radiation emanating from a massive star. This is how NASA describes his photograph on Instagram. They also report that a massive star appears in its center 200,000 times brighter than the Sun. Finally, they point out that this is a young star, with only 1 million years old.
If we go beyond astronomical terms, we could think that 1 million years is a long time. However, if we compare it with other stars, like our Sun, which has 4.5 billion yearswe will see that they are right to describe her as young.
This is what NASA says, but what else do we know about this nebula almost typical of a Marvel movie?
The truth is that it is not a new finding, far from it. The Lagoon Nebula was discovered in 1654 by Italian astronomer Giovanini Battista Hodierna. It is also known as M8as it is the eighth object in the Messier catalog, in which there are another 109 astronomical objects, classified by the French astronomer Charles Messier.
We know that it is 5,200 light years from Earth and that, according to They explain from the NASA page, the massive stars embedded in it “emit enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow.” That is why the result is a spectacle as brilliant as the one seen in the photograph. As for the colors, they correspond to the ionized gases in stars. Red comes from hydrogen and green from nitrogen.
The end result is a wonderful show, for which we could easily imagine The Guardians of the Galaxy. But the best thing is that, unlike the Marvel movies and comics, this is a actual photography. Who needs fictional images with such a magnificent reality out there?