A beautiful accident,
and some support
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Mz3, officially known as
Menzel 3, looked like an ant in early telescopes.
Click-to-enlarge
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The new Hubble image of
Mz3, also called the Ant Nebula, came into being because of an accident of
scheduling. Bruce Balick of the University of Washington had requested
telescope time to image Mz3. So had Raghvendra Sahai at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
Both requests were
approved.
Balick and Sahai dutifully
reported the error, and the Hubble scheduling director decided to give each
scientist half the allotted time. Not wishing to have two half-baked pictures,
the researchers combined their data, produced separately in 1997 and 1998, into
the one image released today.
Coincidentally -- or
perhaps not so -- Balick was Adam Frank's thesis advisor a decade ago. The two
share an interest in learning what creates the looping planetary nebula
structures.
Balick said his Hubble
image provides no direct evidence that magnetic fields are behind the colorful
shapes, adding that its "pure speculation" to say magnetic fields
cause the shapes seen in this or other nebulae.
"On the other
hand," Balick says, "that image is awfully difficult to explain
without magnetic fields, or something else that we haven't thought of."
Balick said other theories
that have attempted to describe the features simply don't work.
"The idea that magnetic
fields are shaping the outflows has got to be very, very seriously considered,
which it hasn't yet been," he said. "It's our best chance at the
moment. But we've been wrong before, and we'll be wrong again."
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