The interstellar medium (ISM) is, as you say, the gas (and dust) in between the stars, within a galaxy. It consists of molecular, neutral and ionized gas, with densities ranging from $\sim 10^ {-3}$ to $\sim 10^ {6}$ particles per cm $^ {3}$ and temperatures ranging from a few K up to 10,000 or 20,000 K. The molecular gas is the coldest and densest, usually found in molecular clouds. The ...
While practicing for an upcoming examination, I ran into this problem: Which of the following best describes dust grains in the interstellar medium: They are a few hundred nanometers in size (siz...
The interstellar medium can be very hot precisely because it is a gas (gases are a bit weird), and because it is extremely tenuous (extremely tenuous gases are beyond weird).
I understand that 1I/ʻOumuamua and the other two bodies (2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS) are classified as interstellar objects based on their distance from the Sun and their speed. In other words the sum...
The CNET article Interstellar comet Borisov looks ordinary, making Oumuamua even weirder says: A paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy lays out the early data on Borisov, which is just the s...
One type is diffuse nebulae, which are "clouds" of gas and dust in interstellar space, often many light years across. They include emission nebulae which are heated by stars and so emit light, reflection nebulae which reflect light from stars, and dark nebulae which block light from stars and nebulae beyond them.
I assume everybody is tired of reading questions derived from the movie Interstellar, I will try to keep this short and simple: In general in movies, in order to have stunning visuals, celestial ob...
Is the angular size of the black hole in the movie "interstellar ...