"But then Hubble Space Telescope began bringing back pictures of planetary nebulae that were distinctly not round. They would often have two lobes on them or they would have point symmetry, so diagonally across from where the center of the star was it was symmetric.

"All of sudden there was something that really needed to be explored, and so my work has focused on explaining why planetary nebulae can have these crazy, symmetric shapes."

NEWS: Why do they?

Palen: "Because of the magnetic fields that are present in the central star and in the envelope as it starts to die."

News: "And so they all are different, though, aren't they?"

Palen: "Yep. Every single one of them is different. ... It seems to depend on the strength of the magnetic field. How fast the material is out-flowing from the center has a lot of complicated physics in it that's really actually pretty interesting to study."

News: "And they're beautiful, too."

Palen: "Oh, they're gorgeous, yeah. And my favorite thing about them is that they actually change on human timescales. So when I go down and look at a planetary nebula in 1998 and I go back and look at it again now in 2006, there will be changes in that nebula. And that hardly happens in astronomy."

NEWS: "Do they change their perspective ... or are they pretty uniform in their expanding?"

Palen: "No ... There's different parts that will expand differently. Sometimes they'll have these things that look like spitballs that come out, and those will often be going faster than the rest of the gas, and so they'll move relative to the rest of the nebula."

News: "Did you originally start out in a science field?"

Palen: "I started out actually as a psychology major. I had been math-science tracked in high school and was tired of being the only girl in all my classes. And so I went off to be a psych major for a year, and then after a year of that I decided that I wanted to study problems that had answers. Definitive, definable, 'Yes, OK, you know the answer is six.' And so I went back to physics, got my bachelor's degree in physics."

News: "Has being a woman — has that been a problem? Have you run into discrimination?"