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.

Comments

Obligatory

[Rubinhood]

In Soviet Russia, you don't observe Red Square, but Red Square observes you.

dude, it's the borg

[circletimessquare]

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

God's rendering engine running out of steam

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:God's rendering engine running out of steam

[SharpFang]

Boundary detection problems will appear next.

Yeah? They've been reported decades ago, and the exploits are out in the wild and in common use (tunnel diode, tunneling microscope and so on).

Will these pesky scientists be surprised when the next batch of patches comes. :)