The Ant Nebula is Attacking Earth with Lasers!
Strange things are going on in the huge Ant Nebula. See there’s these rare laser blasts that come out of a dying star that humans tend to look for. The European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory has spotted such a blast. They’ve suggested that the cluster is hiding a double star system previously undetected.
Let’s talk dying stars for a moment. When mid level stars such as our Sun start getting old and close to their demise they get crazy dense on their way to becoming a white dwarf. So they become smaller but heavier and denser. The star will expel a whole bunch of crap like dust, gas, and other raw elements in this process across the galaxy and we take pictures of it with big telescopes. You’ve seen the backgrounds on your Walmart space cat shirt, like that. Now we’ve known all this for a while, we’ve had telescopes out there for a bit. What’s new is that we’re seeing these crazy intricate structures of ionized gas. In English… natural laser formation. Technically a “hydrogen recombination line laser emission”. Nice.
So what do we do with that information? Well with the Herschel’s crazy sensitive measuring instruments we can see a better picture of what’s there by analyzing the waves, dust, and gasses. Awesome! Now normally when stars die and emit all that junk they’re getting more dense remember so they start sucking all that crap back in leaving the surrounding area pretty much empty. The Ant Nebula is different. See there’s two systems right next to each other (see the astoundingly accurate main image above) so while the one system is dying next door the other system is eating all the stuff that’s being ejected. Neato!
So what have we learned? We learn that we can still inform you of cool things with a ridiculous sensational headline and image (you’re welcome). We also learned that we don’t know jack when it comes to nebula. Which is important to remember, we’re babies in the interstellar game but we’re working on it and more work needs to be supported. Observation devices like the Herschel are steps in the right direction and catching events like this one will help us understand our crazy galaxy as we spin hopelessly on this wet rock tethered to our own little burning future dense void that will suck up a bunch of stuff and some alien astronomer on a distant planet will go “hey look at this!”. Nice.
