Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A diffuse cloud of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness depending on the way the mass absorbs or reflects incident light or emits its own light.
- noun A galaxy. No longer in technical use.
- noun A cloudy spot on the cornea.
- noun A liquid preparation for use in a nebulizer.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A luminous patch in the heavens, far beyond the limits of the solar system.
- noun In pathology, a cloud-like spot on the cornea.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Astron.) A faint, cloudlike, self-luminous mass of matter situated beyond the solar system among the stars. The term was originally applied to any diffuse luminous region. Now, technically, it is applied to interstellar clouds of dust and gases (
diffuse nebula ). However distant galaxies and very distant star clusters often appear like them in the telescope, such as thespiral nebula in Andromeda, known now to be a distant galaxy. - noun obsolete, obsolete A white spot or a slight opacity of the cornea.
- noun obsolete A cloudy appearance in the urine.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun astronomy A
cloud inouter space consisting ofgas ordust (e.g. a cloud formed after astar explodes ). - noun archaic, medicine A white spot or slight
opacity of thecornea . - noun obsolete, medicine A
cloudy appearance in theurine
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun cloudiness of the urine
- noun (pathology) a faint cloudy spot on the cornea
- noun a medicinal liquid preparation intended for use in an atomizer
- noun an immense cloud of gas (mainly hydrogen) and dust in interstellar space
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Fringing the outlines of the nebula is a system of whisker-like rays.
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And yet the work of Fabry and Buisson, which has been verified by Professor Frost at the Yerkes Observatory, shows that the nebula is a seething mass of gaseous matter where there is no rest and over whose vast bulk relative motions of several miles a second are constantly, taking place.
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I know that a planetary nebula is different than a hydrogen cloud.
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The nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a sun-like star only 10,000 years ago.
SETI Institute: Life at the SETI Institute: Paul Estrada -- From Dust to Planets SETI Institute 2010
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E: When in nebula mode (press N), this greatly accentuates the nebula clouds, making them very easy to see.
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E: When in nebula mode (press N), this greatly accentuates the nebula clouds, making them very easy to see.
iTunes 8 Visualizer’s Undocumented Keyboard Controls | Lifehacker Australia 2008
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Snuffles was in reality a superintelligent nebula from a parallel universe, but he had transformed into a dragon in order to visit our universe and had become trapped in that form, adopted by this dragon couple who had no children.
Archive 2007-11-01 2007
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I was originally a superintelligent nebula from a universe beyond yours.
Archive 2007-12-01 2007
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I was originally a superintelligent nebula from a universe beyond yours.
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(A nebula is an interstellar cloud of gas, dust and plasma where stars can both emerge and die.) “This spectacular event is the death of a star,” said study team member James Lloyd of Cornell University.
mollusque commented on the word nebula
Nebulae contain stardust. (See Free Associations)
June 26, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word nebula
Apart from the nebulae WeirdNet has in mind, of course.
October 4, 2008
hernesheir commented on the word nebula
A strain of medical marijuana
January 15, 2010