Monday, September 23, 2013

Wow!


NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a well-established feature on the Internet.  Many are of interest only to specialists, but now and again one comes up that's a work of art in its own right.  This one seems to qualify.




It's of the M2-9 Planetary Nebula, which is about 2,100 light years from Earth.  The photograph was published on September 15th this year.  (Follow that link for a much larger version of the image.)

Spectacular, isn't it?  Does anyone know how large those hourglass shapes are, in terms of light-years in length or other measurements?  Wikipedia doesn't say.

Peter

3 comments:

Erik said...

Following the wikipedia link for the dimensions, i found:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1997A%26A...319..267S
"The physical and geometrical parameters of the nebula then follow. M 2-9 is at a distance of 650pc, is 0.4pc long, has a luminosity of 550Lsun_, and its outer nebula has a dynamical age of 1200yrs, in round numbers."

That would make it 1,3 lightyears or 12,4 trillion km long.

Palm City Girl said...

Neat

Anonymous said...

Does NASA have a sign-up list to receive these pictures on a daily basis?186