The star HD 44179 is surrounded by an extraordinary structure known as the Red Rectangle. It acquired its moniker because of its shape and its apparent color when seen in early images from Earth. This ...

Astronomers may not have observed the fabled 'Stairway to Heaven,' but they have photographed something almost as intriguing: ladder-like structures surrounding a dying star. This image, taken with ...

The supermassive black hole was yesterday's news. On Friday, NASA released an image of a star surrounded by a curious, rare red rectangle. Though the red rectangle has been seen and photographed ...

A striking new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope delivers a deep look into a mysterious cosmic object called the Red Rectangle Nebula. The Red Rectangle, so named because of its bizarre ...

For more than three decades, astronomers have been baffled by a mysterious rectangular-shaped nebula around a distant star. Experts believe some kind of 'molecular forces' cause the nebula's strange ...

Imagine smoke rings seen edge-on and you may gain some insight to what's going on with the deceptive Red Rectangle, which isn't a rectangle at all. The optical illusion is the work of a pair of stars ...

Ladder-like structures surrounding a dying star are just one of the features revealed in a new Hubble Space Telescope image of a nebula known as the “Red Rectangle.” Cataloged as HD 44179, this nebula ...

The Red Rectangle in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn) roughly 2,300 light-years away, also known as star HD 44179, is a unique illustration of a proto-planetary nebula. The image captured by ...

It’s not often that a nebula looks quite so much like a cheesy special effect from some forgotten ’70s sci-fi movie, but the Red Rectangle Nebula qualifies. After all, this seems to betray a total ...