A Symmetrical Cosmic Red Square

Remember the hexagon surrounding Saturn's north pole? Now for our delectation Ano_Nimass Coward sends us to Space.com for a look at a nebula with near perfect bilateral symmetry surrounding a dying star. The so-called Red Square ranks among the most symmetrical objects ever observed by scientists. "If you fold things across the principle diagonal axis, you get an almost perfect reflection symmetry," said the leader of a study of the object, recently published in Science. A possible explanation for the structure's glow, if not its shape, was advanced in a paper appearing in PNAS, which attributes the glow of a similar object — dubbed, confusingly, the Red Rectangle — to exotic space-hardened organic molecules called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons. PAHs are normally unstable but may occur in places like the nebula in question, in nanostructured clusters that are extremely stable and radiation hardened.

Geometry

[Stormx2]

Quoteth the article:

dubbed, confusingly, the Red Rectangle

Quoteth wikipedia:

A square (regular quadrilateral) is a special case of a rectangle as it has four right angles and parallel sides.

How is it confusing?

Too obvious...

[adrianmonk]

In Soviet Russia, the Red Square ejects stars.

On a more serious note, in present-day Russia, the Red Square really does eject -- and beat and arrest [buffalonews.com] -- stars[1] when they show up to demonstrate against the government. Things are getting kinda shaky over there, it would appear.

[1] Garry Kasparov, specifically.

Obligatory

[Rubinhood]

In Soviet Russia, you don't observe Red Square, but Red Square [wikipedia.org] observes [slashdot.org] you [iht.com].

dude, it's the borg

[circletimessquare]

look away, don't send any signals in that direction, or they'll soon follow up, and we'll have to travel back in time to 1980s san francsico to save the whales, or something

God's rendering engine running out of steam

[Tablizer]

Appearently the universe is expanding faster than God's hardware can handle, and we are seeing rendering polygon effects. Boundary detection problems will appear next.

Re:Right angles

[MarkRose]

Objects that are extremely regular and have right angles are usually considered to be artificial in origin.

Yeah, like a sodium chloride crystal. :)

That response has gotta burn like salt in a wound.

Re:God's rendering engine running out of steam

[SharpFang]

Boundary detection problems will appear next.

Yeah? They've been reported decades ago, and the exploits are out in the wild and in common use (tunnel diode, tunneling microscope and so on).

Will these pesky scientists be surprised when the next batch of patches comes. :)

Re:God's rendering engine running out of steam

[bky1701]

Probably just an effect of the memory leak in "humanity()". Don't worry, the garbage collection function "meteor->collide(earth)" will be called eventually to fix it.

Proof of God ...

[HW_Hack]

Not really - a million monkees blowing up a million stars could achieve the same result

Re:Optical illusion?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I'm not an astrophysicist either, but I suspect they kind of check for stuff like that.

Re:Geometry

[theuedimaster]

Remember children, every Red Square is a Red Rectangle, but not every Red Rectangle is a Red Square.

Ah, the famous old riddle...

[oddaddresstrap]

If a nebula with near-perfect bilateral symmetry has exotic space-hardened organic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and there's no one around to smell it, does it have an odor?

Re:Geometry

[Stormx2]

See if you'd put that on a wikipedia article, someone would add the {{Original research}} tag, because the link between being a "pedantic, literal-minded little shit" and being a wikipedia fan hasn't been proven, yet. How about {{NPOV}}? But seriously, stop trolling.

Oh, and in answer to your question, you aren't surprised because you were all too happy to find a coincidental link.

Re:Optical illusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, what Anonymous Coward (btw that's his real name) failed to mention is that he's from Blarus 4.
They have imaged the Red Square thousands of times, it being much closer to them.
It's only us here on earth that have not imaged it so many times.

Re:Geometry

[Walt Dismal]

Let us put this on a scientific basis. The first step is to create a proper acronym to speed discourse. Henceforth, we shall use "PLLS" instead of the longer "pedantic literal-minded little shit."

I, of course, am not a PLLS, as I spell and punctuate correctly and wipe myself properly after every bowel movemnet, because Nanny would beat me severely if I didn't...er.. I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, the 32nd poster previous failed to spell 'incunabula' correctly. Oh, and there are 152 toothpicks on the floor.

Route of Ages

[BoaZaur]

But why this is the "Route of Ages" as spoted by Andromeda's crew long ago in the futur year of 5017 bc

Free Life
Boaz

4 faces

[bronney]

timecube.com