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Hubble Spies Space Sprinkler System
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 06:35 am ET
21 May 2003
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There are many mysterious objects seen in the night sky which are not really well understood A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed view of high-speed jets of material flowing out of a nebula as if from a garden sprinkler. Astronomers cannot explain the phenomenon. The nebula, named Henize 3-1475, is what astronomers call a planetary nebula. These have nothing to do with planets, but gained this classification because they resembled the fuzzy patches of light that planets presented to users of early telescopes. A pair of opposing streams together form an S-shape with the nebula at the center. Scientists know that some sort of nozzle mechanism rules the scene, but they're perplexed as to how it works. Even Hubble can't resolve the central scene with enough detail to solve the mystery. The jets stream outward at about 2.5 million mph (4 million kilometers per hour), faster than any other similar jets known. Henize 3-1475 is about 18,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The central star responsible for the jets is more than 12,000 times as luminous as our Sun and weighs three to five times as much. A group of international astronomers led by Angels Riera from Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, combined Hubble observations with ground-based looks at the system. The results were released with the image today. The research suggests that the nebula's S-shape and hypervelocity outflow is created by a central source that ejects streams of gas in opposite directions and precesses, or carves out a cone-shaped motion in space, once every 1,500 years. The result is like an enormous, slowly rotating garden sprinkler, they say. The flow from the jets is episodic. Every 100 years or so, clumps of gas shoot out for unknown reasons. Researchers speculate that either an unseen companion star is responsible, or that some sort of cyclic magnetic process is at work. Our Sun is known to alter its output in a cycle based on changes in magnetism. Hubble is a cooperative project of the European Space Agency and NASA.
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