I can't remember exactly where I learned/read/heard it, but in the back of my mind there's a statement: Every stellar object that spins has a magnetic field...I'll have to do some digging to verify. If that statement is wrong, the black hole at the center would have a magnetic field, as would the pulsar that was discovered a few years ago that's about a light year away from the black hole. Dan On Sep 5, 2013, at 1:07 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
That may well be it. I had suspected it involved the stars' orientation while forming but I wouldn't have guessed a magnetic field was involved. The writer says, "The galaxy itself has a magnetic field," and that's something I never heard about until now. If that's so, how is it generated, and how strong is it? Could it be (or could it have been) strong enough to affect the orientation of forming stars? That's hard for me to believe. The angular momentum of the galaxy seems more reasonable to me, except that this wouldn't change with the more distant nebulae. I would like to see some study showing how powerful this magnetic field is, if it exists. Thanks, Joe
________________________________ From: Daniel Holmes <danielh@holmesonics.com> To: Utah Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 12:50 PM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Mystery Alignment of Planetary Nebulae Discovered
I've been doing some more looking into this...looks like it might be the galactic core's magnetic field!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/09/05/planetary_nebulae_weird_...
Dan
On Sep 5, 2013, at 12:46 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
It's really intriguing, Dan. Maybe this is some effect of dark energy or dark matter. I would have thought it was because the entire galaxy's stars have a similar orientation while forming, maybe due to the galaxy's rotation -- but that's disproved by the fact that more distant nebulae are not oriented in any special way like these toward the center of the galaxy. Thanks, Joe
________________________________ From: Daniel Holmes <shares@getpocket.com> To: utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 7:49 PM Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Mystery Alignment of Planetary Nebulae Discovered
This is pretty interesting.
Dan
Mystery Alignment of Planetary Nebulae Discovered http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/weird-planetary-nebula-alignment-d...
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