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."

Comments

Re:Bipolar planetary nebula

[CheshireDragon]

I too was thinking that the nebulae and myself have something in common.

Re:Why is that surprising?

[icebike]

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.

Well first, you have to read the SUMMARY where you will find

a population of planetary nebula are all mysteriously pointing in the same direction.

(I will point out that "a population" is very vague, and could in fact refer to a very small subset.).

Then from TFA you see the actual quote:

However, a new study by astronomers from the University of Manchester, UK, now shows surprising similarities between some of these nebulae: many of them line up in the sky in the same way

So from SOME in the article, we get the implication of ALL (wrapped in weasel words) by the submitter, someone named "astroengine".
An unfortunate level of HYPE that we've come to find all too often in Slashdot.

Link to the paper in the article is incorrect

[IndigoZulu]

Correct paper: http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1316a.pdf