Astronomy

This image shows beautiful celestial object, a startlingly symmetrical nebula that christened as “The Red Square” for its color and form. This object discovered when astronomer use advanced imaging technologies known as Adaptive Optics while studying a hot star called MWC 922 located about 5000 light-years from earth in the constellation Serpens (the serpent mythologically associated with medicine).

It is actually an outer periphery of the nebula around MWC 922 that is very faint compared to the core. The image has been processed and sharpened to display the full of its detail and structure. The startling degree of symmetry and level of intricate linear form make the Red Square nebula around MWC 922 the most symmetrical object of comparable complexity ever imaged. The overall architecture displays a twin opposed conical cavities (known as a bipolar nebula), along the axis of which can be seen a remarkable sequence of sharply defined linear rungs or bars. This series of rungs and conical surfaces lie nested, one within the next, down to the heart of the system, where the hyperbolic bicone surfaces are crossed by a dark lane running across the principle axis.

One particularly fascinating feature visible in the images is a series of faint radial spokes, like teeth of a comb, pointing away from the center. Structures such as this are rarely seen in nebulae, and the high degree of regularity in this case may point to the intriguing possibility that these bands are shadows cast by periodic ripples or waves on the surface of an inner disk close to the star at the heart of the system. (Image credits: Peter Tuthill/University of Sydney)

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