Star circle around Sigma Orionis. Coincidence?

[Gyuri]

Hello to everyone here on the forum!
My name is Gyuri.
This is my first and hopefully not the last post here.
Many people are probably familiar with the Stellarium program here.
Certainly one of the most useful one.
I'm happy looking at this, especially when it's cloudy.
One such occasion I something discovered a few years ago in the attached image.
Now I can not keep it to myself, what I found.
Besides, I'm curious about the opinions of experts.
What do we see on this picture?
Some kind of we see an unknown natural formation till now?
Do we see the tangible sign of a star-engineer activity possibly here?
Is what we may discover on the picture is a coincidence only?
But it may be it that I am the victim of only a programmer's joke?
Perhaps it would be God's eyes, which sees everything?
An other man noticed it possibly, that me?

Click to view full size image

Are there any thoughts?

Gyuri

[Gyuri]

I think this little picture is not good enough.
I try to link only to the place:

http://ywbjla.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p ... JPG?psid=1

Otherwise everyone will take forward the Stellarium program.

[owlice]

Hi, Gyuri, and welcome!

You are asking about what appears to be a ring of stars equidistant from Sigma Orionis which one can see in the larger image, yes?

[Gyuri]

Yeah, exactly I meditate on this for a while.

What kind of things you listen to girl!
I am glad that Kodály is between them.

[owlice]

Thanks! I don't know, but hope someone else does and am curious to see what the answer is.

Oh, and I like Kodály! One of my best experiences was singing the Psalmus Hungaricus with Dorati. The soloist, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, was also Hungarian and sang with such emotion, such passion, I've never forgotten the experience of hearing him. (His name, yes; the experience, no. )

[Ann]

Hello, Gyuri!

I think you are asking about a ring of stars around Sigma Orionis. I think that the ring may well exist. It is not perfectly round, so there is nothing supernatural about it. Also, Sigma Orionis is a young star and a very massive one. It emits a powerful stellar wind. It is possible that the wind has blown in all directions around Sigma Orionis, compressing the gas around it, and leading to star formation around it. But you should also remember that the ring-like structure around Sigma Orionis may well be a coincidence and a product of stellar movement. Stars in a cluster move around the center of gravity of the cluster. It could well be that this ring is a temporary phenomenon that will disappear as the stars continue their dance.



You have to imagine the stars in a cluster moving about, creating temporary configurations. But you must also remember that stars live for millions of years or more, and that the stellar orbits are typically so large that we humans can't discern any movement in them during our lifetime unless we use sophisticated intruments.

Ann

[Gyuri]

Hello, Ann!

Probably you are right, I think this is also the most likely.
If you took out my Stellarium program, and the one I found lying on a circle of stars, look at the parameters, you can see that most of the 16-18 magnitude stars, BV index -0.5.
This may not be a coincidence.
In any case interesting is the process that created this is a temporary formation.

However, the map does not tell the distance of stars lying on the circle.
So I don't sure, there are significant correlation between Sigma Orionis and The Circle.
The circle is nearly complete anyway. Only gaps between 11 and 1/2 3.
Unfortunately I could not find the net a good picture of this area.
Difficult to make a good picture of this because sigmaorionis.
Maybe I should ask my friend Ivan Eder, make a nice picture of this area.

Forgive me because my terrible English.

Gyuri

[Chris Peterson]

What do we see on this picture?
Some kind of we see an unknown natural formation till now?

What you are seeing is an artifact. It is commonly seen in star fields generated from databases. They show up around bright stars because such stars produce such large apparent discs that stellar surveys don't see any stars around them, until you are some distance away. If you look through the database at other bright stars, you will probably see similar rings. Crosses are also common, as the diffraction spikes in the survey images also create interference. In this case, the slightly higher density ring suggests that spikes around the edge of the star image were incorrectly recorded as stars. If you can turn different catalogs on and off in Stellarium, you'll see the type of artifacts around bright stars change, as well.

sigori.jpg (9.13 KiB) Viewed 1559 times

This shows the dataset around sigma ORI in the GSC catalog, where you can easily see diffraction spikes and an exclusion zone.

[Gyuri]

Thank you for the clarification Chris!
So if I understand it correctly, the bright star has a diffraction ring around it,
and false the interpretation of the processing program faint stars in the same ring.
Wow, that sentence was too long for me!
But anyway I know that whoever comes here to this site, intelligent enough to understand what I wanted to say.
But I'm glad that I asked this question.
Because I got a reassuring answer to the question, what excited me.
In addition, many people here have learned something.
And I might have found new friends here.

Thank you for your kindness!

Gyuri

P.s.:
I like very much your ancient CCD image from M51.

[Chris Peterson]

So if I understand it correctly, the bright star has a diffraction ring around it,
and false the interpretation of the processing program faint stars in the same ring.

Well, strictly, the ring is not a diffraction artifact, but is caused by scatter and reflection. Spikes and large apparent stellar diameters are diffraction artifacts.

The catalog data looks like it might be from the DSS1 southern (SERC) survey plates. Here's the image from that survey, and you can see that the artifacts seem to line up with patterns in the Stellarium image. It is pretty obvious looking at the survey plate that there is a lot of stuff here that will interfere with an automated star identification routine.

[Gyuri]

I see.
Thank you for the detailed explanation, and because your attention turned towards me.
Wacky Gyuri