NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a region also known as the Soul Nebula, glowing red, located 7,000 light-years from Earth, and Hubble representatives wrote in a description of the image that the red light suffocation is caused by H-alpha emission, which occurs when energetic electrons are lost. The energy inside hydrogen atoms is very high, which causes this distinctive red light to be released, and here we monitor what the Soul Nebula means.
According to the “Space” website, the Soul Nebula is a partner of another nebula, the Heart Nebula, which is a huge cloud of gas and dust, and the “Heart and Soul” nebula complex forms a vast star formation region that extends over 300 light-years, with the two nebulae linked by a bridge. Of gas, both nebulae are filled with bright stars that are only a few million years old, and are new compared to our Sun, which is about 5 billion years old.
The red light in the images captured by the space telescope reveals a host of fascinating features, such as the so-called free-floating evaporated globules (frEGG), which occur in nebulae when energetic radiation from hot stars ionizes surrounding gas by stripping electrons. This causes the gas to scatter. away from those bright stars in a process called photoevaporation, which may help stop star formation in the nebulae.
The gas is so dense that this photoevaporation process occurs much more slowly than in the surroundings of the gas. This slow photoevaporation and the protection of the gas from scattering allows the gas to remain dense enough to collapse and form protostars, which eventually go on to become full stars.