There is an Hamburger in the sky!

The sky is full of objects that have been called by astronomers with very strange names. For example, this item is known as the Gomez’s Hamburger!

The object was discovered in 1985 from a photographic plate obtained by Arturo Gomez from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Probably this object in the photographic plate really resembled a hamburger, but in this higher resolution image taken by the Hubble Telescope I challenge you to find similarities.

On the nature of this object, however, there are still many doubts. For a long time it was thought to be a protoplanetary nebula, in the process of becoming a planetary nebula. The central star would in fact have already begun to expel gas and dust that reflecting its light shine of a white color. In this context, however, the dark band passing through the center of the object remains difficult to interpret.

For this reason it has recently been speculated that Gomez’s Hamburger is not a star in the final stages of its life, but a newly born star. The two white regions around it would therefore be a protoplanetary disk.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble.