Aging Star System Leaves Strange Death Spiral

jamie tips a post at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog about an extremely unusual astronomical phenomenon originating from a binary system about 3000 light years away. Quoting: "The name of this thing is AFGL 3068. It's been known as a bright infrared source for some time, but images just showed it as a dot. This Hubble image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys reveals an intricate, delicate and exceedingly faint spiral pattern. ... Red giants tend to blow a lot of their outer layers into space in an expanding spherical wind; think of it as a super-solar wind. The star surrounds itself with a cloud of this material, essentially enclosing it in a cocoon. In general the material isn't all that thick, but in some of these stars there is an overabundance of carbon in the outer layers which gets carried along in these winds. ... AFGL 3068 is a carbon star and most likely evolved just like this, but with a difference: it's a binary. As the two stars swing around each other, the wind from the carbon star doesn't expand in a sphere. Instead, we see a spiral pattern as the material expands."

Comments

Re:Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

a spiral is exactly the form you'd expect...no mystery there unless you absolutely insist on viewing it in terms of mechanical shock waves.

Also, if you see it as a big cappuccino for even bigger aliens, there's no mystery at all about why they'd stir it in this pattern ;)

p.s.: I'm just having fun, not ridiculing the idea of an electric universe. But I believe that's already been done adequately.

you're a fucking nigger who ridicules what is true. that is why you're a nigger, and why nigger means "stupid maladaptive individual" with no regard for race or color. fuck off.