This may be completely off the mark, but after looking at the amazing photos of various nebulae at the Astronomy Picture Of The Day website, I see amazing similarities between those views of cosmic star-forming----ultimately nova-producing machinations and what I see happening inside the enclosed space of our venerable old Lava Lamp!!

Given the huge amounts of "space" inherent in space, as opposed to the limited space in the lamp, I still feel like I am seeing a speeded up and much simplified science project diorama of those celestial dynamic happenings. The forces at hand produce "round" globules quite like the round forms of planets, moons and stars. There are many other things formed that are irregular like unusually formed moons and comets and meteoric rocks that could be the results of collisions.

To you physicists out there, does comparing the two happenings in my analogy have any validity at all?

Art Thieme