Originally Posted by
trash
The first kind [of Light?]is just the latent glow from the nova itself. Heat up a piece of metal in a fire, and take it out, it still glows in the visible spectrum from quite some time after the heat source is removed.
The gas in the nebula is the same thing except the gas is a glowing plasma more like a candle than a bar of hot steel.[I understand that]
The second is just the star lighting up the gas and dust like the sun lights up a cloud. It's nothing but reflected light, where there is less light because of absorbtion we see the filaments. Like the grey underside of a cloud.
The third kind of light is also a plasma from excited gas, but not from the latent heat of the ejecta. The star provides the energy for the glowing gas, again, in the same way a neon sign or a laser or an aurora.
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