How about another conveyor-belt collapse a little closer to home? OK … here’s Martin Heigan’s M8 Lagoon Nebula In spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the mix of hydrogen gas and cosmic dust which comprises the interstellar medium rotates around the centre faster than the spiral-like arms. The arms are not fixed structures, they are density waves like a highway traffic jam. They come, they go. When a massive clump of cold gas squashes into the inner side of a density wave, the gas squashes out, flattens into a lumpy ‘fried-egg sandwich’, and curdles into star-forming protoclusters of several thousand solar-mass stars. The first collapse took about 3 million years. When the most massive stars imploded into supernovae, the shock waves initiated secondary cluster collapses. So far, three massive clusters have coalesced. The M8 Lagoon Nebula’s first massive cluster, NGC 6350, is about 5 million years old. Its nephew Herschel 36 shows here as the bright white spot in the bluish central region of the ‘lagoon’. H36 is only about a million years old in still forming stars ferociously.
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Get in the pilot’s seat and fly through the Lagoon.