After some thought, I’ve decided to change the way I write about things. Specifically, the universe. I’ve decided to stop using a capital “U” for it, and make it lower case.

Why? Because it’s not really a name. I’ve always capitalized it because it feels like something that should be that way. But technically it’s a noun like building or nebula, and so it should be lower case.

You may or may not have noticed I stopped using “the” when referring to Earth, too. That makes sense to me, since “Earth” is a proper name. We don’t say “the Mars”.

On the other hand, I’ll still say “the Sun” and “the Moon” because it just feels weird to not use the “the”. I still capitalize them, too, because the status of those two words is hazy to me. They’re kinda sorta names, but also not really. At Scientific American they want me to not capitalize them, and they pay me, so I acquiesce^*. But that looks funny to me too. Maybe I’m just used to seeing them upper case, and if I stopped then eventually I’d get used to moon and sun. But then I think that would be confusing when talking about a generic moon, or referring to some other star as a sun. So here, where all decisions are mine, I’ll upper case them.

I now return you to actual science. After the footnote.

^* They also don’t use the Oxford comma but screw that, I love it and I’ve never heard an argument against it that actually makes sense.

Stars are born in our galaxy at a rate of about one or two per year. It’s not like they plop out of star clouds fully formed; they take a long time to settle into being true stars, so that rate is a statistical average. They’re born in clouds of gas and dust, some huge, like the colossal Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, and some wee, like Barnard 68 (one of my all-time fave objects in the sky).

The nearest such star-forming region is called Chamaeleon I, named because we see it in the direction of the lizardly Chamaeleon constellation. The cloud is about 500 light-years from Earth, located on the edge of what’s called the Local Bubble, a vast cavity carved out of the gas between stars by a series of nearby exploding supernovae over millions of years. It’s the closest such cloud to us.

Chamaeleon I called a dark nebula because it’s thick with dust, tiny grains of rock and soot expelled by massive stars when they die. Dust is excellent at absorbing light, so big dust clouds look opaque to us. However, because stars are born there, some clouds are lit up by the newborns inside them, allowing us to see the chaos inside. 

Behold:

This is spectacular, and I shrank it a lot to fit here. Download the 19,500 x 17,500 pixel version to grind you brain into powder. 

You can see lots of stars, some local to the cloud and many behind it (it’s close to us, so there aren’t many stars between us and it in the foreground). The blue material is dust lit by reflected starlight. The most luminous stars dominate that illumination, and these are massive and blue, hence the color. The darker material is where the dust is thicker, blocking our view behind. You can see that where the material is brown/black you see fewer stars.

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