Scientists spot strange lasers coming towards Earth from space ant nebula

The stunning process of dying stars might be even more dramatic than it first appeared

Scientists have spotted two strange lasers coming out of the huge ant nebula.

The mysterious blasts appear to suggest that the cluster is hiding a double star system at its heart.

The rare blast is usually associated with the death of a star, and was seen by the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory.

When middleweight stars like our own Sun get approach their death, they turn into dense, white dwarf stars. As they do, they shed their outer layers of gas and dust into space, creating a kaleidoscope effect that is visible across the universe.

And now scientists have found that process is even more dramatic than it first appears. At the same time, stars throw out powerful lasers, according to the new observations.

In the case of the space ant, it is still not clear where that laser is coming from. But it appears to be a twin star system that is dying, right in the middle of the spectacular nebula, which is also known as Menzel 3 – after the man who discovered it, who by coincidence was one of the first to suggest that lasers could emerge in such a way.

“When we observe Menzel 3, we see an amazingly intricate structure made up of ionized gas, but we cannot see the object in its centre producing this pattern,” says Isabel Aleman, lead author of a paper describing the new results.

“Thanks to the sensitivity and wide wavelength range of the Herschel observatory, we detected a very rare type of emission called hydrogen recombination line laser emission, which provided a way to reveal the nebula’s structure and physical conditions.”

Normally, the area around stars is relatively empty and dead because the material is thrown off into space and the remaining gas is drawn back into the star. But in the case of the star in the ant nebula, a second star appears to be capturing the mass as it is ejected.

“We used Herschel to characterise various components of gas and dust in nebula around old stars, but we were not necessarily looking for a laser phenomenon,” adds Toshiya Ueta, principal investigator of the Herschel Planetary Nebula Survey project. “Such emission has only been identified in a handful of objects before; this was a remarkable discovery that we did not anticipate. There is certainly more to stellar nebulae than meets the eye!”