Data from the Edge of Space & Time Itself

[Octafish]

10. Amazing!

From the article:

"This really is a surprising find and, if it holds true, a very important one," said Bryan Rees of the University of Manchester, co-author of the paper to appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "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."

The other two populations of planetary nebulae appear to be randomly oriented in relation to the galactic disk.

SNIP...

"The alignment we're seeing for these bipolar nebulae indicates something bizarre about star systems within the central bulge," said Rees. "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."

Interestingly, bipolar planetary nebulae do not appear to have a preferential orientation in our galactic neighborhood many thousands of light-years from the galactic core. The alignment effect only seems to act near the center of the Milky Way.

CONTINUED...

http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/weird-planetary-nebula-alignment-discovery-hubble-eso-130904.htm

The more astronomers look, the more we all realize how much there is to learn.