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| Ant Planetary Nebula |
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the ant's body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun-like star. Though approaching the violence of an explosion, the ejection of gas from the dying star at the center of Mz3 has intriguing symmetrical patterns unlike the chaotic patterns expected from an ordinary explosion. Scientists using the Hubble space telescope would like to understand how a spherical star can produce such prominent, non-spherical symmetries in the gas that it ejects.
One possibility is that the central star of Mz3 has a closely orbiting companion that exerts strong gravitational tidal forces, which shape the outflowing gas. For this to work, the orbiting companion star would have to be close to the dying star, about the distance of the Earth from the Sun. At that distance the orbiting companion star wouldn't be far outside the hugely bloated hulk of the dying star. It's even possible that the dying star has consumed its companion, which now orbits inside of it, much like the duck in the wolf's belly in the story "Peter and the Wolf."
