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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
Yes but they don't stop once they've formed. They keep on turning - asynchronously - or maybe not asynchronously.
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They have plenty of Lithium.
Anyone?
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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
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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.
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... is what they're pointing at.
Notice how that's left out of the article. Coincidence? I think not!
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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.
I was thinking the same thing, but now I'm not so sure. We have at least 8 decent points of data in our solar system for orbital bodies like stars orbiting the center of gravity. Among the 8 planets, 3 of them (Me, V, J) have an axial tilt of less than 4 degrees, 4 of them (E, Ma, S, N) have an axial tilt between 23 and 29 degrees, and one of them (U) is damn near sideways. In other words, our planets are all over the place. So it would seem to make some sense if the stars orbiting the galactic center were also all over the place on their axial tilt, so it wouldn't make sense that the bipolar nebulae are all oriented in the same direction. I wonder how many nebulae this includes though. If it is roughly half of them then that would seem to be in line with our solar system.
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View the entire universe background radiation from the POV of our planet and it has stranger properties
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Axial tilt on planets is tought to be hugely influenced by colisions when they were forming. I'm far from being a scientist, but I don't think you can use planets as a baseline.
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.
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Well, actually we don't know a whole hell of a lot about the revolution of stars that far away, but it sound to me like said dual-orifice ejections tend to protrude out of the poles of the stars.
That many of the poles of these stars tend to be aligned is not all that unexpected when the Galaxy itself is one huge gravitational system.
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Or is it that Axial tilt tends to be more likely aligned perpendicular to the plane of the Galaxy due to small, but real gravitational influences on those stars as they orbit around the galaxy center?
(Galaxy Rotation period is about 225 million earth years).
Would whirling a fully gimbled gyroscope around your head on a string have any effect on the orientation of the gyroscope's axis?
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Axial tilt on planets is tought to be hugely influenced by colisions when they were forming.
And what, forming stars wouldn't go through similar processes? You realize that the major difference between a gas giant and a star is mass, right? It's not like they are completely different kinds of bodies, one of them just got so much mass that fusion started.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Close. It actually says, "We apologize for the inconvenience."
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Correct paper: http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1316a.pdf
I was thinking the same thing, but now I'm not so sure. We have at least 8 decent points of data in our solar system for orbital bodies like stars orbiting the center of gravity. Among the 8 planets, 3 of them (Me, V, J) have an axial tilt of less than 4 degrees, 4 of them (E, Ma, S, N) have an axial tilt between 23 and 29 degrees, and one of them (U) is damn near sideways. In other words, our planets are all over the place. So it would seem to make some sense if the stars orbiting the galactic center were also all over the place on their axial tilt, so it wouldn't make sense that the bipolar nebulae are all oriented in the same direction. I wonder how many nebulae this includes though. If it is roughly half of them then that would seem to be in line with our solar system.
In astronomy/astrophysics, you have to extrapolate the macro from what we know of the micro, but in this case, I'm not sure that your analogy holds water. The difference in mass between a star and a planet is orders of magnitude. This is like comparing the spin of a baseball to the movement of the tectonic plates. If you look at the solar system as a whole, even though the planets themselves have tilted spin, in general the planets are all on the same plane orbiting the sun.
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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 kicker is that the poles all seem to be perpendicular to what the presumed orientation of the rotation should have been.
The trick, is figuring out why the poles were aligned with the galactic plane, and not perpendicular to it, which the spinning of the galactic gas cloud would suggest.
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The original press release points to a fully different topic paper.
A better link is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013arXiv1307.5711R/
Perhaps collisions of stars with other things big enough to have an effect (i.e. other stars) is much rarer than planets being knocked around by other planets (and planetoids) and even non-collision stars passing by.
I wonder if gas balls will re-orient to surrounding rotations a lot more easily than rocky planets.
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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.