Messier Monday: The Omega Nebula, M17 (Synopsis)

“For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” -John F. Kennedy

If you went back in time to the birth of the Sun and the Solar System, what would you see? You wouldn't simply have a protostar with a gas-and-dust filled nebula around it, with the seeds of what would become our planets. Sure, they would be there, but they'd be immersed in a giant molecular gas cloud with hundreds-to-thousands of stars just like ours, as well as some that were far more massive than anything we find in our neighborhood today!

Image credit: Andrea Tamanti, via http://www.tamanti.it/Nebulae/M17_sfull.htm. Image credit: Andrea Tamanti, via http://www.tamanti.it/Nebulae/M17_sfull.htm.

Star formation is a relatively rare thing in our galaxy today, as most of the Milky Way's stars were formed long ago. Nevertheless, there are always "bursts" of it happening, including in seven of the 110 objects in the Messier catalogue. One of the most spectacular ones can be found in the southwest skies shortly after sunset tonight, and provides not only a treat for skywatchers everywhere, but a lesson about our own place in the cosmos, and where our successors will come from.

Image credit: VLT’s Survey Telescope, ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Acknowledgement: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute. Image credit: VLT’s Survey Telescope, ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Acknowledgement: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute.

Take a look inside the Omega Nebula, Messier 17, on this spectacular Messier Monday!

Tags

More like this

"I wouldn't dream of working on something that didn't make my gut rumble and my heart want to explode." -Kate Winslet Welcome back for another Messier Monday! At the start of each week, we take a detailed look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue. This week, we've…
"In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance." -Henry Miller You know it as the most fundamental law of relativity: that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And yet, the observable Universe itself, which has been around for 13.8 billion years since…
"It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light." -Benjamin Disraeli From here on Earth, most of the stars we see in the night sky are ancient, having departed from the star-…
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it." -Vaclav Havel But the spiral is more than a metaphor or a mathematical shape, it's also the most common feature observed in the galaxies out there in the Universe. There are 27 spiral…