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Beyond our own Sun,
the next nearest stars are incredibly far away. Even at the
speed of light, it would take about 5 years to reach the nearest
star. (Today's fastest spacecraft would take about 100,000 years.)
The
distance to the stars is so great that we need a new measure
of distance: the light-year, the distance that light travels
in one year -- about 6 trillion miles. In the image above, a
new generation of stars is being born from enormous clouds of
dust and gas, some 5000 light-years from Earth. Can you make
out the stars in this picture?
Top: Young stars forming in the Lagoon Nebula,
in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Left: The
Keyhole Nebula, near the Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years
from Earth. New stars form when these huge amounts of matter
collapse under their own gravity. The dust and gas in this image
is illuminated by the light from a star nearby.
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