Speaker: Steve Tonkin

For millennia people have wondered about the misty patches in the night sky, which became called “nebulas” – clouds – and the advent of the telescope merely increased the number we could see without adding greatly to our knowledge of what they are. The true nature of these enigmatic “fuzzy blobs” has only been known for a century or so, and they reveal a tremendous amount of information about the life and death of stars, the structure of the Milky Way galaxy, and the nature of the Universe itself.