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Orion Nebulae Research Paper

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“Nebulae” inside the Milky Way Galaxy or separate, distant Galaxies?
Discoveries of what were termed “nebulae” began in the early 17th century. The first of these discoveries was the Orion Nebula, which looked like a normal star to the naked eye. French scholar Peiresc discovered it in 1610 using one of the first telescopes to be made. Later, in 1656, Christiaan Huygens observed the interior of the Orion Nebula and determined that it consisted of a compact quadruple star system instead of a singular star. During the 18th and 19th century, nebulas were discovered even though astronomers were mainly scanning the sky for comets. Some major astronomers who contributed greatly to the discovery of nebulas, among other things, during the 18th and 19th century were Messier and the Herschel family. Though the instrumentation available to astronomers during the 18th and 19th century were highly advanced compared to earlier times, they weren’t advanced enough to detect the motion of extragalactic objects or their composition. This lack of precision instrumentation, and thus the dissociation from motion of stars/star-clusters/nebulae, were the main reasons astronomers during this …show more content…

The ability to obtain the light spectrum of starlight was a big step, which allowed for the determination of motion in 3-D space. Astrophotography—especially the dry plates—was a major technological development during this period which led up to the classification of nebulae as distant galaxies/star systems. Telescopes could be mounted with plate-holders and spectrographs or studio cameras could be mounted with a prism on top to show spectra of the objects being photographed. All these developments greatly contributed to early-20th century astronomers’ ability to realize that many nebulae weren’t inside the Milky Way but rather were separate star systems of their

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