A way of estimating more accurate distances to the thousands of so-called planetary nebulae dispersed across our Galaxy has been announced by a team of three astronomers based at the University of Hong Kong: Dr David Frew, Prof Quentin Parker and Dr Ivan Bojicic. The scientists publish their results in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Despite their name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They were described as such by early astronomers whose telescopes showed them as glowing disc-like objects.

We now know that planetary nebulae are actually the final stage of activity of stars like our Sun. When they reach the end of their lives, these stars eject most of their atmosphere into space, leaving behind a hot dense core. Light from this core causes the expanding cloud of gas to glow in different colours as it slowly grows, fading away over tens of thousands of years.

There are thousands of planetary nebulae in our Galaxy alone, and they provide targets for professional and amateur astronomers alike, with the latter often taking spectacular images of these beautiful objects. But despite intense study, scientists have struggled to measure one of their key properties - their distance.

Dr Frew, lead author on the paper, said: "For many decades, measuring distances to Galactic planetary nebulae has been a serious, almost intractable problem because of the extremely diverse nature of the nebulae themselves and their central stars. But finding those distances is crucial if we want to understand their true nature and physical properties."

The solution presented by the astronomers is both simple and elegant. Their method requires only an estimate of the dimming toward the object (caused by intervening interstellar gas and dust), the projected size of the object on the sky (taken from the latest high resolution surveys) and a measurement of how bright the object is (as obtained from the best modern imaging).

The resulting so-called 'surface-brightness relation' has been robustly calibrated using more than 300 planetary nebulae whose accurate distances have been determined via independent and reliable means.

Prof Parker explained that, "the basic technique is not new but what marks out this work from what has gone before is the use of the most up-to-date and reliable measurements of all three of those crucial properties".

This is combined with the use of the authors' own robust techniques to effectively remove "doppelgangers" and mimics that have seriously contaminated previous planetary nebulae catalogues and added considerable errors to other distance measurements.

The new approach works over a factor of several hundred thousand in surface brightness, and allows astronomers to measure the distances to planetary nebulae up to 5 times more accurately than previous methods. "Our new scale is the first to accurately determine distances for the very faintest planetaries" said Dr Frew.

"Since the largest nebulae are the most common, getting their distances right is a crucial step".

Planetary nebulae are a fascinating if brief stage in the life of a low- to middle-weight star. Being able to better measure distances and hence the sizes of these objects will give scientists a far better insight into how these objects form and develop, and how stars as a whole evolve and die.

The new work appears in "The Ha surface brightness - radius relation: a robust statistical distance indicator for planetary nebulae", David J. Frew, Quentin A. Parker and Ivan S. Bojicic, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford University Press.