Skip Talbot <ski### [at] aolcom> wrote:
> A fun, little project I did the other day (and let render overnight), I
> decided to make a nebula.  The starfield is made of MegaPOV glow objects
> and anyone familiar with the functions in math.inc or Mike William's
> isosurface tutorial should recognize the surface used for the nebula.

Looks like a planetary nebula or a Wolf-Rayet nebula.  We could call it the
"Jellyfish Nebula."  :-)  Both of these nebula types are stellar death
shrouds, so you might want to add a white hot stellar core in the center to
make it more physically realistic.

The difference between them is the size of the core.  Planetary shrouds are
spun by middleweight stars like our Sun.  Wolf-Rayets are the super
heavyweights of stars, with the core alone being several times as massive
as the Sun.  You wouldn't want your class-M planet to be within several
dozen light years of one when one of these goes supernova!  Fortunately for
us, Wolf-Rayets are extremely rare, and there are none that pose any danger
to Earth's ecosystem.

Planetaries are much tamer; the core never explodes, but just fizzles out.
Planetaries get quite creative in form.  (You may have gotten a chain email
with an image dubbed the "Eye of God."  This is planetary nebula NGC 7293,
commonly called the Helix Nebula.)  Although astronomers know how they're
created, they don't quite know what causes the beautiful shapes.  One
hypothesis is the gravitational effects of its planets.

Post a reply to this message