History Main / SpaceClouds

Now there ''are'' clouds of a sort in space, but these are objects light-years across, with enough mass in them that gravity can keep them together, and their density is far below even industrial-grade vacuums. In short, if you flew your rocket ship up to, say, the Orion Nebula, it would pretty much look like nothing was there. The density of the gases in a nebula is about 1000 particles per cubic centimeter. The air you breathe just walking around on Earth is around 2.5x10^19 particles per cubic centimeter, or about 250-million-billion times denser. The nebula's density may be 1000 times the density of the interstellar medium, but it's still a near perfect vacuum.

* ''Wall-E'' Has the ship Axiom parked next to a nebula.

** Don't forget the opening credits where we see the Voyager passing though a cloud just a few meters thick, yet dense enough for us to see. Voyager evoked this trope literally every episode.

Far out in space, our hero's CoolShip is on the run from the BigBad and hides out in a nebula/gas field/whatever and is obscured from their pursuer's sensors. It's a misty realm where you may not even be able to see your own hand in front of your face. This trope is about what seems to be a [[OmnipresentTropes common theme]] in nearly all ScienceFiction shows: a (nearly) human-scale cloud that is inexplicably stable in space.

Far out in space, our hero's CoolShip is on the run from the BigBad and hides out in a nebula/gas field/whatever and is obscured from their pursuer's sensors. It's a misty realm where you may not even be able to see your own hand in front of your face.

Now there ''are'' clouds of a sort in space, but these are objects light-years across, with enough mass in them that gravity can keep them together, and their density is far below even industrial-grade vacuums. In short, if you flew your rocket ship up to, say, the Orion Nebula, it would pretty much look like nothing was there. This trope is about what seems to be a [[OmnipresentTropes common theme]] in nearly all ScienceFiction shows: a (nearly) human-scale cloud that is inexplicably stable in space.

Compare AsteroidThicket. A version of SpaceDoesNotWorkThatWay.

* In the ''StarTrekVoyager'' episode ''Year of Hell,'' a crippled ''Voyager'' hides inside of a nebula so dense that it produces a visible fog ''inside'' the ship's corridors. Captain Janeway even orders the hull breaches sealed to avoid having an "indoor nebula."

To add to the confusion, some of the most famous pictures taken of outer-space phenomena are in false-color -- to help illustrate some aspect of it, such as ultraviolet radiation. This information is not commonly provided in images released to the public, and "true color" pictures of these stellar phenomena are not as easy to find, which means artists are more likely to use the wrong images as a basis for what they look like to human eyes.

To add to the confusion, some of the most famous pictures taken of outer-space phenomena are in false-color -- to help illustrate some aspect of it, such as ultraviolet radiation. This means that even if we were 'right there,' it still wouldn't look the way we might expect it to.

This trope has grown in popularity in direct proportion to the number and quality of images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope.

* ''BattlestarGalactica'' makes the nebulae-are-visible-close-up mistake. Though it serves only as a landmark.

** Don't forget the opening credits where we see the Voyager passing though a cloud just a few meters thick, just dense enough for us to see. Voyager evoked this trope literally every episode.

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<<|YouFailPhysicsForever|>>

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* The Mutara Nebula in ''{{Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan}}'' is [[TropeCodifier one of the best-known and most imitated examples]].
* The Ion Cloud around Mr. Universe's planet in ''{{Serenity}}''. JossWhedon admitted that he knew exactly how unscientific this was, but he needed it there for the [[RuleOfCool completely awesome]] battle scene.

* In the ''Star Trek Voyager'' episode ''Year of Hell,'' a crippled ''Voyager'' hides inside of a nebula so dense that it produces a visible fog ''inside'' the ship's corridors. Captain Janeway even orders the hull breaches sealed to avoid having an "indoor nebula."

In the real world, this does not happen. Simply put, there's ''no force'' that could keep such a dense cloud of gas together. It would quickly disperse due to intermolecular collisions and thin out into the interstellar medium.

* In ''Star Wars: Empire at War'', nebula fields disable special abilities when one flies into them. Ion storms (which look almost the same, except with Space Lightning) do exactly the same thing, in addition to disabling ships' DeflectorShields.