Nebulae discovered: dying stars that appear as 'cosmic butterflies' in the night sky have been discovered, Discovery reported Wednesday.
According to the report, astronomers discovered a population of mysterious planetary nebulae in the vast galaxy bulge that are pointing in the same direction.
University of Manchester astronomers, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT), surveyed 130 planetary nebulae and sorted them into three distinct populations namely: "elliptical," "either with or without an aligned internal structure," and "bipolar."
The astronomers noticed that the bipolar population of nebulae has a mysterious type of alignment in the long axes.
"This really is a surprising find and, if it holds true, a very important one," University of Manchester in the United Kingdom Study Author Bryan Rees said in a statement. "Many of these ghostly butterflies appear to have their long axes aligned along the plane of our galaxy. By using images from both Hubble and the NTT we could get a really good view of these objects, so we could study them in great detail."
Planetary nebulae are created after a red giant star dies, puffing its outer layer into space. Sir William Herschel was the one who coined the term after describing the celestial bodies that appear circular and planet-like when viewed from a telescope.
These nebulae can take on striking and mysterious forms, but bipolar planetary nebulae are considered as the most beautiful because its two lobes expand in opposite directions giving it a "cosmic butterfly" appearance.
"The alignment we're seeing for these bipolar nebulae indicates something bizarre about star systems within the central bulge," Rees said. "For them to line up in the way we see, the star systems that formed these nebulae would have to be rotating perpendicular to the interstellar clouds from which they formed, which is very strange."
On the other hand, the other planetary nebulae populations appear as though they have been randomly oriented in relation to the galactic disk.
"While any alignment at all is a surprise, to have it in the crowded central region of the galaxy is even more unexpected," University of Manchester and the paper's second author Albert Zijlstra told the Hubble press Wednesday.
The scientists also noted that nothing has been identified yet in terms of the magnetic fields that cause the alignment of the planetary nebulae.
"We can learn a lot from studying these objects," Zijlstra said. "If they really behave in this unexpected way, it has consequences for not just the past of individual stars, but for the past of our whole galaxy."
This new astronomical discovery will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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