...so the phenomenon seems to cross a vast range of spatial scales (from human-scale in the lab, to cosmological distances)!
Mystery Alignment of 'Butterfly' Nebulae Discovered
Astronomers have discovered something weird in the Milky Way's galactic bulge -- a population of planetary nebula are all mysteriously pointing in the same direction.
While using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT) to survey 130 planetary nebulae situated near the hub of our galaxy, astronomers from the University of Manchester sorted them into three populations based on their shape: "elliptical," "either with or without an aligned internal structure" and "bipolar."
They noticed the mysterious alignment in the long axes of bipolar planetary nebulae.
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