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

Re:Optical illusion?

[barakn]

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.

Obligatory

[Rubinhood]

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

Re:Right angles

[tverbeek]

Objects that are extremely regular and have right angles are usually considered to be artificial in origin.

Yeah, like a sodium chloride crystal. :)

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:It's Another Hourglass Morphology

[barakn]

There's just one problem with your argument. The stuff in the Red Square image is relatively cool uncharged dust and gas (it's an infrared image after all), not a hot plasma, and therefore can't carry a current. Typical Birkeland Current/Electric Universe fanboy spouting off without having a clue...