Monday Bites: Into The Spiderverse

 Into The Spiderverse: The Red Spider Nebula. 

Credit: ESO

Sometimes it so happens, rather than expanding into a perfectly spherical shell, a planetary nebula can assume the characteristic shape of a butterfly or an hourglass, spotting two lobes on either side of its central white dwarf. Although butterfly and hourglass are plainly descriptive terms, in the trade tongue, this class of planetary nebula is called a Bipolar Nebula.

What you see here is a typical example. The Red Spider Nebula, as imaged by the La Silla Observatory in Chile, is located near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, 5,000 light years distant, northwest of the Sagittarius constellation. 

Although astronomers don't know much about their origins, the consensus is that a binary pair of rotating white dwarfs could be the purported sculptor, their strong magnetic fields funneling gas out of the system. 

This image was originally released by ESO on September 4, 2013.