Pith Number

pith:YRTEY34G

pith:2026:YRTEY34GDPPJFB4NQ57U4XRBJX

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Ancient 'ghost' planetary nebulae discovered with amateur telescopes

D. Jones, J.A. Manuel, M. Santander-Garc\'ia, N. Reindl

Careful long-exposure narrow-band imaging with modest telescopes reveals three ancient planetary nebulae that are nearly dissipated.

arxiv:2604.20280 v2 · 2026-04-22 · astro-ph.SR · astro-ph.GA

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\pithnumber{YRTEY34GDPPJFB4NQ57U4XRBJX}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

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Claims

C1strongest claim

Via careful processing of long-integration, narrow-band imagery with modest aperture telescopes at a dark-sky site, we reveal three new candidate planetary nebulae (JAM 2, JAM 3, and JAM 4). Each measures several arcminutes across with [O iii] surface brightnesses of order 30 mag arcsec^{-2}. For each nebula, we identify a candidate central star, the parallaxes of which lead to nebular age estimates in the range 50-100 thousand years.

C2weakest assumption

The assumption that the identified objects are genuine planetary nebulae and that the candidate central stars are correctly associated with them, so that Gaia parallaxes can be used to derive reliable distances and thus nebular ages.

C3one line summary

Three new candidate ancient planetary nebulae, each several arcminutes across with extremely low [O iii] surface brightness around 30 mag arcsec^{-2}, were discovered using amateur telescopes, with candidate central stars yielding age estimates of 50-100 thousand years.

References

37 extracted · 37 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] Acker, A., Boffin, H. M. J., Outters, N., et al. 2012, Rev. Mexicana Astron. As- Article number, page 9 A&A proofs:manuscript no. aa59488-26 Fig. 10: Starless [Oiii] image of JAM 4 and the resulting s 2012

[2] Althaus, L. G., Panei, J. A., Miller Bertolami, M. M., et al. 2009, ApJ, 704, 1605 Astropy Collaboration, Price-Whelan, A. M., Lim, P. L., et al. 2022, ApJ, 935, 167 Astropy Collaboration, Price-Whela 2009

[3] Bailer-Jones, C. A. L., Rybizki, J., Fouesneau, M., Demleitner, M., & Andrae, R. 2021, AJ, 161, 147 2021

[4] 2025, Nature Astronomy, 9, 380 2025

[5] E., Köchling, P., Kotov, S., et al 2026

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-03T14:05:24.971940Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

c4664c6f861bde92878d877f4e5e214deb9afd976c9120ea6e1fdff43ee82414

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.20280 · arxiv_version: 2604.20280v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.20280 · pith_short_12: YRTEY34GDPPJ · pith_short_16: YRTEY34GDPPJFB4N · pith_short_8: YRTEY34G

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/YRTEY34GDPPJFB4NQ57U4XRBJX \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: c4664c6f861bde92878d877f4e5e214deb9afd976c9120ea6e1fdff43ee82414

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "f3e4eb8ca91282998c31316e6342d310bfb546eedbe681cdb2e96efd134d6c41",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.GA"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.SR",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-22T07:28:02Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "8a862a50feb7eae1ffc9d4b2f2d57237f7e8d9f85c94842c21db3fc0c3880f12"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.20280",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}