Really, I want to know. Chris Blattman doesn’t know either. Please tell me in the comments.
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I thought wikiSky had listed it as a “bubble” nebula, which I presume is a nebula that either formed as a perfect sphere or as a disk with the flat plane perpendicular to us. Personally, I think it looks like camera glare, but I suppose that’s why I’m not an astronomer…
It’s a bubble nebula–I couldn’t track down this particular one, but there are images of many similar ones on the web
While I can’t refute Kromer’s response, I’ll note that the image reminds me of gravitional lensing caused by dark matter:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/patricia_burchat_leads_a_search_for_dark_energy.html
It’s definitely not a gravitational lens. For one thing, there is faint green emission even within the circle, which you wouldn’t expect with a lens. For another, it’s extremely symmetric, which is unlikely to arise from a messy real-world cluster of galaxies. (An individual star wouldn’t lens things that dramatically.)
It’s definitely a bubble nebula. Extremely symmetric and well-formed, though, which is interesting. The surrounding interstellar medium must be very homogeneous (and probably pretty dilute).
It’s the subprime bubble waiting to burst.
Wonder whatever is (or was) at the center… ?
It’s a Praxis ring.
A long time ago, in another corner of the galaxy, someone had a very bad day.
someone didn’t use a coaster on your cosmos… (wow if I had a nickel for every time I heard that)
Franklin,
Thanks for reminding me that the Star Trek writers were a bunch of anime geeks when anime just a really niche geek thing in the US.
Proof that that Alan Greenspan is from another planet.
Now that you’ve seen The Ring, a creepy-looking girl will crawl out of your computer monitor in seven days.
Jim Grant was of course responding to:
“At this juncture, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the sub-prime market seems likely to be contained.” — Ben Bernanke, March 2007
Looks like a prototypical planetary nebula to me. Just one that’d escaped notice before.
There are several bubble-shaped nebulae out there. Some of them are “planetary nebulae” (so called because they look a bit like fainter, more spread-out versions of, say, Neptune or Uranus when seen through a modest telescope). These are the blown-out envelopes of stars like ours (or up to about ten times larger) when they get old and unstable. Much of the time they’re not this symmetric, though. What’s left in the middle is a white dwarf, which used to be the core of the star.
As the APOD link mentions, Wolf-Rayet stars (much larger and more energetic than the ones involved in PN formation) also throw off spherical shells of material – generally, though, it’s hard to miss the star in the middle, and there are multiple eruptions of stuff over time.
And there are also empty bubbles, cleared-out spaces in dusty, gassy areas which are blown by the radiation from young stars. This doesn’t look so much like one of these, though, since this one appears to be in a relatively clear area to start with.
There, my amateur astronomy geekdom is satisfied!
Doesn’t anyone remember 2001? It is a vacant Star Child membrane, of course.
From my brother-in-law. An astro-physicst:
At first glance, it is probably a “planetary nebula” — the outer layers blown off of a low-mass star when it dies. Alternatively, it could be an artifact of the camera optics — secondary reflections forming an (out-of-focus) image of a nearby bright star. I would need to know the context of the observation (sky coordinates of the image, type of camera used) to evaulate this further.
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