The astronomy quote of the week comes from Aussie astronomer Peter Tuthill:
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel."
The end could be closer than we thought.
In the March 1st Astrophysical Journal, Tuthill reports on a photogenic binary star system he’s been watching for some time. The dancing duo is a Wolf-Rayet system, which means that one of the stars is dangerously unstable. As in, close to going supernova. The press release calls it a “ticking time bomb.”
For 8 years, Tuthill has believed himself lucky for getting such a nice angle to watch the spiraling star from. Here’s how he describes an image of it (posted on the next page of this post) on his web site:
A sequence of 11 sharp frames show the elegant spiral nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius to be rotating in a circle every 8 months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock. In the image to the left [follow the jump to the next page to see it], we have rotated the camera frame of each of the 11 images so as to follow the motion, and as a result we can stack all our images into a single false-colour composite.
But Tuthill’s stellar view of the star could be bad news for Spaceship Earth.
Continue reading 'Bang, whimper, or … gamma ray burst from the Death Star?' >
