Ever since the time I first saw what a galaxy looked like back when I was a kid, I was enchanted by pictures of them, as well as all the intricacies that went along with it.  All the exploding stars, theories on how everything was created and how it all began, and how really vast the universe was.  I then came upon a book written by Stephen Hawking, one of the best, if not the best mind of the century, called “A Brief History of Time.”  The book I’ll probably write about in a few days, but the concept of which revolves around how images like the one below come about.

The image below, is called the Snowflake Cluster and the Cone Nebula.  One of the many jaw-dropping images that NASA has captured through sophisticated telescopes that bring us these awe-inspiring pictures of the universe we know very little about.  The picture speaks of patterns that result in the tumultous unrest that accompanies the formation of an open cluster of stars in the Snowflake Cluster.

Bright stars from the Snowflake Cluster dot the field. The stars soon heat up and destroy the gas and dust mountains in which they formed. One such dust mountain is the famous Cone Nebula, visible in the above image, pointing toward a bright star near the center of the field. The entire region is located about 2,500 light years away towards the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).

Now for those who aren’t really into astronomy, you may wonder what 2,500 light years means.  Let’s take the above example and say that a star is 2,500 light years away. The light from that star has traveled at the speed of light to reach us. Therefore, it has taken the star’s light 2,500 years to get here, and the light we are seeing was created 2,500 years ago.  So we are actually looking at the past and seeing how that star looked 2,500 years ago! In a similar way, to put it in a better perspective, our sun is 8 or so light minutes away.  If the sun were to suddenly explode right now, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes because that is how long it would take for the light of the explosion to get to the Earth.

So there   More of that when I talk about Stephen Hawking’s book!  For now, if you want to download a higher resolution of the image above, please click HERE.