THE CYGNUS LOOP

Stars are like people, we are born, we live, and we die. Before we leave this earth we call home, we all hope that we get the chance to leave something behind to allow people to remember the good things. Stars evolve over time. It may take millions of years or billions of years for a star to complete its life cycle. The star is born in the nebula, a cloud of gas and dust floating in space, in the center of the nebula, hydrogen gas is pulled together by gravity. The mass then starts to spin, as it spins more and more hydrogen gases pull together. The collision from the hydrogen atoms creates enough energy to heat the nebula to 15 million degrees Celsius. At this point nuclear fission occurs in the core of the nebula, the surrounding gas begins to glow and a prostar is created.

Now the star has to establish its size. It begins to gather mass from the nebula, the more mass in the nebula the bigger the star will be. When this gathering process is done and its mass has stabilized, the star is now considered a main sequence. For the following millions and billions of years the star will continue to glow. Eventually, the star's nucleus becomes unstable and begins to contract. While this is happening the outer layers of gas and dust begin to expand. As it expands it cools and becomes red, the star is now a red giant. In the incipient stages of death the shell continues to expand until finally, the death of the star occurs, it explodes, throwing a wall of gas into space.

The Cygnus Loop is one such example. The loop, as it is called, is actually the remnants of a Super Nova that died. Fifteen thousand years ago the Super Nova, which was a member of the Cygnus ConstelLation, exploded and to this day the explosion is still expanding into space. The awe-inspiring work of art left in space is the result of the atoms of the diffrent gases. These atoms, excited by the shock wave of the explosion, give off diffrent colors, Oxygen-blue, Sulfer-red, and Hydrogen-green (all other colors are a combanation of these gases) thus, creating a stellar work of art. Since the relaunching of the Hubble Telescope in 1997, we have been very fortunate to photograph such sights in deep space.