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About
This is one of the most unusual nebulae known in the Milky Way. Catalogued as HD 44179, this nebula is more commonly called the 'Red Rectangle' because of its unique shape and colour as seen with ground-based telescopes.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a wealth of new features in the Red Rectangle that cannot be seen by ground-based telescopes looking through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The origins of many of the features in this dying star still remain hidden or even outright mysterious, some are well explained by theorists like the Dutch scientist Vincent Icke from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
In 1981 Vincent Icke and collaborators showed that a spherical gas ejection from a dying star hitting a dust torus would give rise to shocks that can produce cone-like outflows similar to the two cones seen in this nebula.
Meteorologists produce weather forecasts by advanced calculations of temperatures, pressures, velocities and densities for the air masses in our atmosphere and, to some degree, theorists like Icke are doing exactly the same for objects in space. Whether modelling the weather in the Earth’s atmosphere or the processes in distant gaseous nebulae, scientists calculate the motion of the gas by using a complicated set of expressions known as hydrodynamic equations.
Most of the matter in the Universe is in the form of gas. The weather on Earth gives rise to spectacular patterns such as thunderclouds and tornadoes in the air masses here. Likewise, the ‘weather’ in gas clouds in space, like the Red Rectangle, can be fascinating.
Of the many different parameters in Vincent Icke’s calculations, only the density of the gas and the dust are observed in the nebula.
Links
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMHBNGHZTD_FeatureWeek_1.html http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula_collection/pr2004011a/web_print
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