A pinwheel nebula is a ''nebulous region'' in the shape of a pinwheel.

Spiral galaxies

The term 'Pinwheel nebula' is an antiquated

misnomer A misnomer is a name that is incorrectly or unsuitably applied. Misnomers often arise because something was named long before its correct nature was known, or because an earlier form of something has been replaced by a later form to which the name ...

used by observers before

Edwin Hubble Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an Americans, American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many objects ...

realized that many of these spiral shaped nebulae were actually 'island universes' or what we now call galaxies.

Wolf–Rayet nebulae

Some

Wolf–Rayet star Wolf–Rayet stars, often abbreviated as WR stars, are a rare heterogeneous set of stars with unusual spectra showing prominent broad emission lines of ionised helium and highly ionised nitrogen or carbon. The spectra indicate very high surface ...

s are surrounded by pinwheel nebulae. These nebulae are formed from the dust that is spewed out of a

binary star A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in wh ...

system. The stellar winds of the two stars collide and form two dust lanes that spiral outward with the rotation of the system. An example of this is

WR 104 WR 104 is a triple star system located about from Earth. The primary star is a Wolf–Rayet star (abbreviated as WR), which has a B0.5 main sequence star in close orbit and another more distant fainter companion. The WR star is surr ...

External links

"The Twisted Tale of Wolf-Rayet 104, First of the Pinwheel Nebulae"
Some Wolf–Rayet stars in binaries are close enough that we can image a rotating "pinwheel nebula" showing the dust generated by colliding winds in the binary system, from aperture masking interferometry observations.
Pinwheel Galaxy from ESA/Hubble
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