NEWS IN BRIEF: Cometary knots brought into focus

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Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics C. Robert O'Dell and graduate student Kerry P. Handron recently observed thousands of huge tadpole-shaped objects surrounding a dying star astronomically close to Earth. The "cometary knots," so called because of their knotted glowing heads and streaming tails, became visible when O'Dell used the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to explore the Helix nebula in the constellation Aquarius.

O'Dell and Handron have detected 313 of the cometary knots and estimate that there are over 3,500 in the entire nebula. Previous ground-based observations only showed a faint spoke-like pattern and a hint of structure in the Helix, while the HST images showed layers of objects in more detail. The findings appear in the April issue of Astronomical Journal

This item appeared in the News section of the April 19, 1996 issue.

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