Photo # 1 (May 2010)

IC 418: THE SPIROGRAPH NEBULA

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
But I give myself to it….
I have been circling for thousands of years,
And I still don't know:
Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song.

                                  -Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA);
Acknowledgement: R. Sahai (JPL) et al.

What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood. Perhaps they are related to chaotic winds from the variable central star, which changes brightness unpredictably in just a few hours. By contrast, evidence indicates that only a few million years ago, IC 418 was probably a well-understood star similar to our Sun. Only a few thousand years ago, IC 418 was probably a common red giant star. Since running out of nuclear fuel, though, the outer envelope has begun expanding outward leaving a hot remnant core destined to become a white-dwarf star, visible in the image center. The light from the central core excites surrounding atoms in the nebula causing them to glow. IC 418 lies about 2000 light-years away and spans 0.3 light-years across. This false-color image taken from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the unusual details.

Are the mysteries of outer space any more profoundly challenging than the mysteries of inner space?

At this moment in human time, it seems to me that the greater and more urgent challenges are in the latter.  For if we do not solve the puzzle of how to overcome our human inertia, if we cannot accept and absorb the challenged of global heating and other impending ecological disasters that are upon us, then all other mysteries will be solved by others who come after us... Long after us... When Gaia reconstitutes the life upon her in a new iteration...

                                - Dan Benor, MD