It has been a mystery for more than 30 years.

It was first discovered in 1975 right here in the Red Rectangle, and has since been observed elsewhere, even in other galaxies. Physicists are only recently homing in on its composition, and it’s not what they expected.Īstronomers call this nebula’s alien illumination Extended Red Emission, or ERE. Dust fluorescing? The dust in our homes thankfully doesn’t glow, and neither does the celestial variety. But here it’s diluted and dominated by a different shade of orange-red given off by glowing dust. Spectrographs detect glowing hydrogen - the normal hum-drum white-bread emissions of nebulae everywhere. However you see it, the question remains: Why should gem-like symmetry materialize in an enormous gaseous nebula? Or perhaps it’s more like a squared-off bow tie or a woven “God’s eye.” Or maybe it’s a giant X with interconnected ladder-like steps. In a universe of vast swirling curves, where celestial straight lines are almost nonexistent and geometric shapes the stuff of dreams, we stare at a giant rectangle. The first head-twister is immediately obvious. It took years, and better instrumentation, including studies performed by the Hubble Space Telescope, to fully reveal how odd and intriguing is this dusty gas cloud 2,300 light-years away. Things changed in 1973 when a rocket-borne infrared sky survey discovered the ruddy nebula surrounding the binary, soon labeled HD 44179 after the star’s catalog designation. Located in the constellation Monoceros the Unicorn, its central 9th-magnitude binary star was discovered in 1915 by the famous double-star hunter Robert Grant Aitken.

Its very light is strange, its composition is food for philosophy, and it remains a hot venue of current research. The Red Rectangle Nebula doesn’t merely look modern-art cubist bizarre.

Red rectangle open in middle