Incredible!

This Hubble telescope snapshot of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula, reveals that the object has an hourglass shape with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. A planetary nebula is the glowing relic of a dying, Sun-like star.

The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter that accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. According to one theory on the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud, which is denser near its equator than near its poles.

Think about it, you are exploding a red giant - a star of radius 150,000,000 miles (i.e enlarge our Sun until it swallows not only the Earth but Mars as well) from the core outwards.

The initial shock waves from the start of the blast will throw the outer layers of the star off first. The supernova itself could take 3 days or 3 hours to really kick into gear. This gives the outer core a big head start over the inner core in the race outwards. Finally your implosion triggers a devasting explosion and the entire inner core blows apart with a massive shock wave vacuating the entire core. That is what you are seeing here. It expands the sun from a sphere into a torus - like a doughnut from our point of view. Eventually the gas starts to cool down - after glowing as bright as a billion suns for some time! As it cools its e-m radiation eventually red shifts.

Wow, is this for real!



http://www.seds.org/hst/Hourgls.html



Does anybody have more information on this?

The following is very good.

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