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A Symmetrical Cosmic Red Square
Remember the hexagon surrounding Saturn's north pole? Now for our delectation Ano_Nimass Coward sends us to Space.com for a look at a nebula with near perfect bilateral symmetry surrounding a dying star. The so-called Red Square ranks among the most symmetrical objects ever observed by scientists. "If you fold things across the principle diagonal axis, you get an almost perfect reflection symmetry," said the leader of a study of the object, recently published in Science. A possible explanation for the structure's glow, if not its shape, was advanced in a paper appearing in PNAS, which attributes the glow of a similar object — dubbed, confusingly, the Red Rectangle — to exotic space-hardened organic molecules called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons. PAHs are normally unstable but may occur in places like the nebula in question, in nanostructured clusters that are extremely stable and radiation hardened.
In Soviet Russia, the Red Square ejects stars.
On a more serious note, in present-day Russia, the Red Square really does eject -- and beat and arrest -- stars[1] when they show up to demonstrate against the government. Things are getting kinda shaky over there, it would appear.
[1] Garry Kasparov, specifically.
In Soviet Russia, you don't observe Red Square, but Red Square observes you.
look away, don't send any signals in that direction, or they'll soon follow up, and we'll have to travel back in time to 1980s san francsico to save the whales, or something
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Appearently the universe is expanding faster than God's hardware can handle, and we are seeing rendering polygon effects. Boundary detection problems will appear next.
Table-ized A.I.
Be relentless!
Not really - a million monkees blowing up a million stars could achieve the same result
Its not the years, its the mileage
I'm not an astrophysicist either, but I suspect they kind of check for stuff like that.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
If a nebula with near-perfect bilateral symmetry has exotic space-hardened organic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and there's no one around to smell it, does it have an odor?
Actually, what Anonymous Coward (btw that's his real name) failed to mention is that he's from Blarus 4.
They have imaged the Red Square thousands of times, it being much closer to them.
It's only us here on earth that have not imaged it so many times.
But why this is the "Route of Ages" as spoted by Andromeda's crew long ago in the futur year of 5017 bc
Free Life
Boaz
timecube.com