Astronomers just wasted almost ten years staring at something they didn’t realise was an optical illusion

M C Escher's got nothing on this.

Astronomers just wasted almost ten years staring at something they didn’t realise was an optical illusion

M C Escher's got nothing on this.

IN 2007, the Hubble space telescope snapped a picture of a deep space standoff 4,300 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini: two planetary nebulas (given the snappy titles of NGC 2371 and 2372) circling each other in what would surely end in spectacular interstellar fireworks.

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They waited... and waited. And nothing happened.

Only recently did a combined team from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) realise that they hadn't been looking at two objects at all: Hubble had captured an image of one massive nebular, three light-years across. It was all an optical illusion.

"A progenitor star can be seen here as a pinprick of orange-red light, surrounded by a green, blue and aqua-tinged puff of gas," explains the ESA website. "This shell appears to have a regular, elliptical shape that is sliced in half by a dark lane running through the nebula, which also encompasses the central star."

The nebular has now been renamed NGC 2371/2 or NGC 2371-2, and won't attract quite the same attention from astronomers looking for a light show. 

[Via: Gizmodo]

Marc Chacksfield
Content Director

As Content Director of Shortlist, Marc likes nothing more than to compile endless lists of an evening by candlelight. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.