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Mystery Alignment of Planetary Nebulae Discovered
astroengine writes "Astronomers have discovered something weird in the Milky Way's galactic bulge — a population of planetary nebula are all mysteriously pointing in the same direction. They noticed the mysterious alignment in the long axes of bipolar planetary nebulae. 'This really is a surprising find and, if it holds true, a very important one,' said Bryan Rees of the University of Manchester, co-author of the paper (PDF) to appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 'Many of these ghostly butterflies appear to have their long axes aligned along the plane of our galaxy.' The team of astronomers, who used data from Hubble and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT) to survey 130 nebulae, posit that powerful magnetic fields may be behind the phenomenon."
One moment, they're saying "Yeah, this is great, we're going to make terrestrial and gas giant and ice ball planets and dwarf planets and everything", but before you know it they're just sitting there sulking.
I am officially gone from
Why is this surprising?
It makes sense that if all of the stars that formed the nebulae came from the same giant swirling cloud of gas, then the stars formed would tend to have angular momenta mostly aligned upon that same axis. When those stars explode later, the axis of the planetary nebula will be along this same axis.
They noticed the mysterious alignment in the long axes of bipolar planetary nebulae.
Perhaps they forgot to take their Lithium and Prozac?
View them from the right solar system and the nebula spell out WILL YOU MARRY ME SQUARDANTELLA?
Amazing what a few dozen carefully arranged nova bombs can do.
Yup, the marriage proposal that wiped out 17 promising young civilization.
For any galactic bulges.
Anyone?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
This is just a fashion statement among galaxies ... like slouchy pants or sideways hats.
A couple of million years, and they'll all be wearing their bipolar planetary nebula crossways.
This is essentially just like bell-bottom pants. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
we just found the protector fleet.
Now we know which way to go, or not go.
Obviously these are the Pierson's Puppeteers fleeing the explosion at the galactic center. It's not a rosette, but Niven may have been misinformed.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The direction the axis points has a lot more to do with comfort than magnetism.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"The team of astronomers, who used data from Hubble and the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT) to survey 130 nebulae, posit that powerful magnetic fields may be behind the phenomenon."
Hey, you mean that mainstream science may be coming around to what http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/ have been suggesting?
Good luck!
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
... is what they're pointing at.
Notice how that's left out of the article. Coincidence? I think not!
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The rotation of the galaxy imparts a rotational momentum onto objects in its gravitational field? Thus the nebula begin to rotate in the opposite direction. When the suns explode, the majority of the mass looks as if it travels along the axis of rotation. The expelled mass's path of minimal energy is towards the original body's axis of rotation. Is it this easy, or did I miss something?
They left it out to try and get dinner reservations before anybody else.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
... and the formed arrow will point to a Walmart
That is left as exercise to the student.
And the more extravagant claims you mentioned aren't legitimate.
Concerning mainstream astronomy though, it does not know all the locations in which electromagnetic forces are at play on galactic scales. They believe they do, but creating imaginary matter such as dark matter indicates they don't. Moreover, electric fields which are studied on a daily basis on earth, can neatly account for the galactic rotational speeds we see obviating the need to invoke fictional matter.
And as for the center of the galaxy, and other galaxies, it's far more likely that EM fields that are observed on a daily basis in our own solar system and on earth in labs accounts for the rapid spin seen, than imaginary black holes which have never even been directly observed.
I imagine in 40 years dark matter and black holes will be seen the way we now see 15th Century maps labeling oceanic areas not explored as "here be dragons."
Conspiracy theorists beware, even more important is what they're pointing away from!
Yeah. Galaxy is exploding. Not news.
It's the direction the Precursors left the galaxy!
They're all pointing at Hoags object.
Of course if they were all being WASTED by some giant space-cannon from a single galactic source, that might be a reason they're all aligned similarly too...but none of the astronomers will talk about THAT, will they?
-Styopa
What a bunch of airheads. Inexplicable astronomical phenomenon? Dark Matter is the cause!
Correct paper: http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1316a.pdf
... and laughing
Mean, cruel nebula!!!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
My army of globular clusters with longbows will slay thy army of planetary nebula with long axes before they even get in range to attack!!!!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Here is the preprint: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013arXiv1307.5711R
We use high-resolution H {\alpha} images of 130 planetary nebulae (PNe) to investigate whether there is a preferred orientation for PNe within the Galactic Bulge. The orientations of the full sample have an uniform distribution. However, at a significance level of 0.01, there is evidence for a non-uniform distribution for those planetary nebulae with evident bipolar morphology. If we assume that the bipolar PNe have an unimodal distribution of the polar axis in Galactic coordinates, the mean Galactic position angle is consistent with 90{\deg}, i.e. along the Galactic plane, and the significance level is better than 0.001 (the equivalent of a 3.7{\sigma} significance level for a Gaussian distribution). The shapes of PNe are related to angular momentum of the original star or stellar system, where the long axis of the nebula measures the angular momentum vector. In old, low-mass stars, the angular momentum is largely in binary orbital motion. Consequently, the alignment of bipolar nebulae that we have found indicates that the orbital planes of the binary systems are oriented perpendicular to the Galactic plane. We propose that strong magnetic fields aligned along the Galactic plane acted during the original star formation process to slow the contraction of the star forming cloud in the direction perpendicular to the plane. This would have produced a propensity for wider binaries with higher angular momentum with orbital axes parallel to the Galactic plane. Our findings provide the first indication of a strong, organized magnetic field along the Galactic plane that impacted on the angular momentum vectors of the resulting stellar population.
The original press release points to a fully different topic paper.
A better link is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013arXiv1307.5711R/
An explanation may be found in some theories found here http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
I have worked out an elegant solution that can be collapsed to only 88 dimensions, where infinitesimally small unbound super strings made of pure dark energy are curled up in tiny unobservable sub-plank scale vibrating loops that create immeasurable gravity-like dark froth along the alignment axis.
> ... is what they're pointing at. Notice how that's left out of the article.
True, they were rather nebulous about it.
Could it be they're all being stretched as they're attracted towards one black hole?
rainbow worlds or Groombridge?
Y'all missed out on a great game, and I'm getting old.