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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.
There are some artifacts in the image. Notice the stars with 6 rays. The rays are created by support structures holding the secondary mirror of the telescope in front of the primary mirror. The fact that the square doesn't have hexagonal symmetry argues for its existence as a real object.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
In Soviet Russia, you don't observe Red Square, but Red Square observes you.
When I first looked at it I two 90 degree cones of ejecta blasting from a central point along the rotation axis of the original star. Like the Eye Nebula would look if seen from the side.
My second thought was it looked like those things we made in kindergarden where you wrap colored yarn around two sticks. I think my mom still has the one I made her, she used to put it on the Christmas tree.
It is most devinitly NOT a lens artifact, look at the other stars, they have six points, those are definitly caused by the camera, the Keck telescope uses hexagonal mirrors in its array.
Absolutly beautiful no matter how you look at it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Observant space enthusiasts will notice the excessively large number of hourglass morphologies that continue to appear in NASA's press releases. These hourglass morphologies can only be awkwardly called the result of gravitation. A cursory familiarity with laboratory plasma physics will help people to recognize that the most likely explanation is that these are in fact z-pinches wich result from Birkeland Currents. In a zoomed image, you can see the filamentary Birkeland Currents on two opposing sides of the red "square" being pinched down to a central point. These same filaments are also observable, but in cross-section, in the 1987A supernova remnant. Which components are visible varies from image to image, but the general morphology of the hourglass remains discernible.
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Here are some additional hourglass morphologies with pictures that have been observed:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4953165/
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0510 05eta-carinae.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 26bug-nebula.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 15milkyway.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Supernova-1987a
Since hourglass morphologies are somewhat disconfirming to traditional mainstream cosmologies (ie, the Big Bang), the fact that they continue to be observed all over the universe escapes the notice of professional astrophysicists, whose primary concern is to prove the Big Bang Theory and Stellar Evolution Theories. Objectively interpreting these shapes for what they most likely represent means dropping complicated, mainstream astrophysical explanations, and accepting the notion that electricity flows through space over plasma as we know it does within the laboratory. In these particular instances, at least, it is clear that the electrical force is dominant to gravity. We can opt to devise all sorts of gravitation-centric explanations for hourglass morphologies, but in doing so, we consciously opt to violate Occam's Razor.
The implications of such strong evidence of electricity in space are overwhelming -- which provides all of the explanation necessary for avoiding abandonment of the traditional, more popular gravity-centric theories. When astrophysicists eventually accept that plasma in space has electrical resistance just like the plasma we observe in the laboratory, then they will begin to re-interpret all of our observations in terms of Maxwell's Equations rather than fluid and gas laws. And the enigmas of dark matter and dark energy will forever disappear, as this substitution can provide the exact forces necessary to explain things like how spiral galaxies can spin as if they are solid plates and how matter might repel other matter. The fact that we as a culture currently prefer to consider imaginary forces and particles to explain these "anomalies" rather than forces that we already understand will forever paint us to future generations as people who decided to favor the mathematicians and theories over our observational data and decades of experimental laboratory physics work.
The evidence for electricity in space is not a sparse patchwork here and there. It is a flood of data that is only allowed to escape the notice of the public with the help of overconfident astrophysicists and a mob mentality within the space enthusiast community. Anybody who is intellectually curious about the universe and less concerned with what the people around them believe than what in fact appears to be true should consider learning more about plasma physics and the electric universe we live in. Don Scott
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
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.
Having said that, there are some faint hexagonal spikes created by the central object, but they are much fainter than the hour glass shape..
I wouldn't use the term "quasar-like" because the word quasar is an acronym for "quasi-stellar radio source" and i don't think this object is the source of many radio waves
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Anonymous Coward is quite wrong. All the news articles about the Red Square are referring to it as a new nebula. It hasn't been "imaged thousands of times by hundreds of instruments over the past decade." It has only been imaged by two intruments over the last several years. It wasn't imageable until recent advance in adaptive optics, as AC should have known had AC read any of the articles. Mod parent uninformative.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Ah, that bit is a tad unclear. The reasoning "as it has four right angles and parallel sides." is the reason it is a rectangle, not a special case of a rectangle.