File:Celestial spiral with a twist.jpg
Original file (996 × 997 pixels, file size: 194 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
 | This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below. Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. You can help. |
Summary
| Description |
English: Although it looks like the pattern of a shell on the beach, this intriguing spiral is in fact astronomical in nature. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured this remarkable image of a binary star system, where two stars — LL Pegasi and its companion — are locked in a stellar waltz, orbiting around their common centre of gravity. The old star LL Pegasi is continuously losing gaseous material as it evolves into a planetary nebula, and the distinct spiral shape is the imprint made by the stars orbiting in this gas.
The spiral spans light-years and winds around with extraordinary regularity. Based on the expansion rate of the spiralling gas, astronomers estimate that a new “layer” appears every 800 years — approximately the same time it takes for the two stars to complete one orbit around each other. LL Pegasi was first highlighted about 10 years ago when the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained a picture of the almost-perfect spiral structure. This was the first time a spiral pattern had been found in material surrounding an old star. Now, ALMA’s observations, of which this image only shows one “cross-section”, have added an extra dimension to reveal the exquisitely-ordered 3D geometry of the spiral pattern. A full view of the 3D video can be seen in this video. An additional image shows a composition of the ALMA and Hubble data. |
| Date | |
| Source | https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1710a/ |
| Author | ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/H. Kim et al. |
Licensing
_logo.svg){kind=logo} |
This media was created by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Their website states: "Unless specifically noted, the images, videos, and music distributed on the public ESO website, along with the texts of press releases, announcements, pictures of the week, blog posts and captions, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided the credit is clear and visible." To the uploader: You must provide a link (URL) to the original file and the authorship information if available. |
  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
| |
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| current | 04:34, 11 April 2017 | | 996 × 997 (194 KB) | Huntster | Use its native resolution and not a stretched/enlarged version. |
| 14:06, 8 March 2017 |  | 1,280 × 1,281 (153 KB) | Jmencisom | User created page with UploadWizard |
File usage
The following 3 pages use this file:
Global file usage
The following other wikis use this file:
- Usage on ca.wikipedia.org
- Usage on fr.wikipedia.org
- Usage on it.wikipedia.org
- Usage on ja.wikipedia.org
- Usage on pl.wikipedia.org
- Usage on sv.wikipedia.org
- Usage on www.wikidata.org
