Coppe-Martin 3 (CopMart 3) – The Guardian of Forever

This is the second published new discovery I’ve been a part of. But Coppe-Martin 3 (CopMart 3) is just the first in a series of new discoveries the Belgian brothers Renaud and Olivier Coppe unearthed in data I have captured.

We’ve now been partnering for some time on the process of digging these things out of overlooked areas in the sky. My primary responsibility is capturing and stacking the data, while Renaud and Olivier do the hard work of identifying candidates and documenting them for the authorities. At this point, CopMart 3 is just a candidate planetary nebula. But at some point, we hope to have it verified as a true planetary nebula through spectral analysis.

CopMart 3 (PN-G 012.5-05.4) is a planetary-nebula candidate, located in the constellation of Sagittarius, near the globular cluster Messier 22 and the well-known Messier 8 Nebula (the Lagoon Nebula).

I have no solid data on the distance of this object from Earth. But I spent some time searching the public data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia Satellite Survey. Unfortunately, Gaia had no data on the suspected progenitor star (which is marked in the overlay), but I found several stars very close to it visually. These stars may be much closer or much farther from us than CopMart 3, but it’s the best semi-literate guess I could come up with. Based on the parallax data from those stars, it’s possible that CopMart 3 is around 11,000 light years away.

Note that the name “planetary nebula” is a misnomer. Planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets. Astronomers in the 18th century thought these objects were planets, but now we know differently. When a star with 80% to 800% of the sun’s mass begins to run out of hydrogen fuel, it starts fusing helium into heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. As it does this, the additional energy from those stepped-up levels of fusion cause it to expel its outer layers.

Ultimately, the star expels all its outer layers from its core, leaving the core exposed in sort of a cosmic burp. Once all the helium is burned up, fusion ceases in the core and what is left is a giant, dense ball of carbon (about the size of the earth, but with the mass of the sun)—a diamond in the sky called a “white dwarf.” That core no longer produces new energy, but it’s still extremely hot and gives off copious amounts of radiation, ionizing the gas it expelled earlier. That cloud of gas then eventually dissipates. But before it does, the ionized gas gives off light we can record here on earth with our cameras (if the star is close enough to us).

For a much more technical discussion, check out Renaud’s excellent writeup on Astrobin where he discusses the object’s morphology, it’s apparent size, and other scientific facts about it.

We chose the name Guardian of Forever at the suggestion of the inimitable Lloyd Smith, who owns Deep Sky West Remote Observatory where my telescopes operate. It harkens back to an iconic episode of the original series of Star Trek called City on the Edge of Forever—the only Star Trek episode written by Harlan Ellison. It also guest stars a young Joan Collins. The Guardian of Forever is a spacetime portal that propels Kirk, McCoy, and Spock back to 1930s New York.