Nebulae

"Someday everyone who has ever lived on this planet will adorn the heavens...looking very much like the nebulae that are created when a sun-like star sheds its outer layers and dies." - Carolyn Porco (American Planetary Scientist, Leader of Cassini Imaging Team)

"...and this is the kind of stuff out of which the Earth is made...and this is the kind of stuff out of which our bodies are made...and if you give this cloud another 10 billion years it will go to school and chew gum." - John L. Dobson from his movie "A Sidewalk Astronomer"

There are many nebula in the cosmos. Nebulae are interstellar clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases that can form from the death of stars, the collapse of gas in the interstellar medium, and death of planets. The Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302) image relates to what Carolyn Porco stated above. The Butterfly Nebula is a planetary nebula that has a central star that is a white dwarf, the same type of star our sun will be after its red giant phase billions of years from now. Who knows what our nebula will look like, but something like the Butterfly Nebula would be a beautiful tribute to humankind, to all life, and the planets and moons of our solar system. When the Sun comes to its final death its compressed heart becomes a diamond. Perhaps this diamond will become the centerpiece of our nebula.

All the matter, including the "star stuff" in our bodies, that came from the life and death of a star will be returned back to the cosmos from whence it once sprang from in the form of a nebula. In a way we do live forever, in the sense that the matter we're composed of never gets destroyed (law of conservation of mass). The matter only gets transformed through time and space probably becoming part of many things over time - stars, planets, moons, elements, etc. If infinity and forever do exist then you (the matter of you) may go through all forms of life in space time.

It's also interesting when you are stargazing to think about other civilizations that may have been and are now gone when you look at nebulae. It's an interesting thought about the vastness of space time and what might have existed in other places during other times in the cosmos.

Now instead of talking about death, lets talk about birth and creation. The above image is the Orion Nebula. There are stars born in this nebula that are newborns (only a million or so years old). Planetary disks are formed from this nebula like our Earth and gases are also present in this nebula which can spawn gas giants like Jupiter. Nebula are not only clouds of gases and elements that embodies what may have been the end of civilizations and planetary systems, but a beginning again for stars, planets and perhaps for life as well. This process would fit nicely into the cosmology Einstein and John Dobson supports: That the universe is not created from a big bang (the something from nothing idea) and it has its own processes for recycling and recreating matter through time. In this view the cosmos is Eternal.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory Astrophotography by Wong

** Image source is from NASA

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