3D PARABOLIC GALAXIES

[parabola]

Greetings!  I joined this forum because I need help finding photos online of particular types of galaxies that I can email to my brother --- the photos, not the galaxies!  I joyfully watch cable programs on the Science Channel about the cosmos.  Maybe a few years ago, I distinctly remember seeing photos of amazing galaxies --- I think they were galaxies --- that were either the shapes of 3D parabolas or 2 back-to-back 3D parabolas.  (Excuse my brain fart, but I can't think of the name of the shape of a 2D parabola extended onto 3 dimensions.)  If not galaxies, maybe they were nebulae.  Picture a perfectly smoothly curved bowl or 2 such bowls back-to-back.  I just spent over an hour searching the web --- I don't use Google.  I can't find such a picture!  I did find a few nebulae, the crab nebulae, i.e.;  but I thought I had seen photos of structures that were very much more clearly the shapes that I have described.  I also recall that the program mentioned, and maybe showed with a photo, that over a wide space of the universe(?) or our galaxy(?), the axes of these structures were directionally aligned.  The photo(s) were not close-ups.  They were far enough away to see the entirety of the structures... maybe that made them appear more distinctively smoothly shaped.

 

Am I remembering this wrongly?  Were they nebulae?... something else?  Where can I find such photos online?

[TerryMcK]

Hello and welcome to the forum. I have no idea what you are referring to but a typical galaxy looks like this:

 

Whereas a nebula which will be only be seen in our own Milky Way galaxy might look something like this:

 

 

Note the colours in the nebula above are false colours and not representative of the true colours you would see if our human eyes were sensitive enough.

[paul]

Sounds like the back to back fried eggs, so angled views of galaxies like:

Sombrero Galaxy - Wikipedia

 

Edited June 17, 2022 by paul