Hubble Finds Unidentified Object In Space

Gizmodo is reporting that the Hubble space telescope has found a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. Some are even suggesting that this could be a new class of object. Of course, without actually understanding more about it, the speculation seems a bit wild. "The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."

Comments

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no moon!

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no moon!

Correct. It's Nibiru the brown dwarf.

Re:Obligatory

[somersault]

This is what happens when God plays with lighters after eating mexican food.

Re:Obligatory

[Eudial]

Didn't you get the memo? A meme that is 20+ years old is an old meme. A tired meme. A meme that needs to rest in peace.

Re:Obligatory

[Enleth]

I saw the FA five minutes ago and though "I bet the first comment on Slashdot now is 'That's no moon!' this article is there already". How come I'm not surprised at all?

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a trap!

Re:Obligatory

[pfbram]

Is it headed our way? If so, we'll finally be able to put those Y2K generators to good use.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Comet Empire.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the station bug.

Re:Obligatory

[joeytmann]

And I thought /.ers were above racist jokes....

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...Hubble found the Pierson's Puppeteers' Klemperer rosette

Re:Obligatory

[casals]

Looks like a black monolith to me.

Re:Obligatory

[KlomDark]

Nah, it's the remains of the Pak homeworld.

Re:Obligatory

[eln]

Is posting xkcd comics as retorts to Slashdot posts 20 years old yet? Please tell me it is, because I would really like for it to rest in peace as soon as possible.

Re:Obligatory

[daveywest]

I'm going to bet its Mongo.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be God! No doubt...

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's plainly obvious to me that this thing is one of trillions of space ships that's been sent to spy on Earth. With trillions of ships, eventually one is going to have its cloaking generator malfunction.

Re:Obligatory

[Terminus32]

"That's no moons; it's a space station!" Let's start all kinds of crazy paranoia! It's a Death Star-type planetoid heading for Earth in time for 2012!!!

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's J-Lo?

Re:Obligatory

[muhadeeb]

No! it may be the first observable Wormhole although a temporary one. Hey isn't that how they are , just temporary.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

i just think somebody sneezed on the lens.

That's no moon. It's a space station.

[lecithin]

FTA-

"Apparently, a scientist at the LHC declared that the object is similar to the flash that an Imperial Star Destroyer does when reaching Warp 10.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[rodney dill]

...but can it do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs?

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[jaguth]

"They've gone plaid!" - Barf - Spaceballs

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[jd]

Wait a minute - since when do Imperial Star Destroyers use warp drives? They use Bistromath. That's why the commanders always seem drunk.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[hashax]

no, its the Firefly, after the show being cancelled it had nowhere else to go.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[77Punker]

Minor correction: the ship's class is Firefly, her name is Serenity.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[neltana]

Come on, everyone knows that a Kessel is a measure of volume. Geez.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

My amp goes to Kessel.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean in *under* 12 parsecs.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[symbolset]

Inter hop vectoring?

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[ucblockhead]

Please turn in your Dork card. Star Destroyers don't have warp engines.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[timlyg]

I wonder how he got hired...

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a Steakhouse, but she handles like a Bistro!

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[CrazedWalrus]

Then what *do* they have in that thing? A Cuisinart?!

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[camperdave]

... but can it do the Kessel run in 1.8 × 10^14 qelI'qams

There. Fixed that for ya.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[MMC Monster]

And a parsec is a measure of distance.

My thought (admittedly based on other folks on the 'net) is that the kessel run is a race from one point on the surface of the volume of Kessel, to another point on the far end of the volume.

The fact that you can do it in a particularly small number of parsecs suggests that you are getting really close to the even horizon of a black hole at the center of Kessel.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our cloaking device has failed....

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't it just be the diagonal of a kessel cube then?

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[KDR_11k]

Oh, I figured he was talking about a DVD box in deep space.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[clone53421]

Not if you can bend space-time or tunnel through it. For that matter, somebody else already mentioned that a black hole would curve space so as to possibly shorten the distance if you flew very close to it.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Feanturi]

They have a "hyperdrive". And it would also seem that they go "only" at light speed, given various quotes from the movies. The Enterprise could probably kick the Empire's ass single-handedly.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Kamokazi]

Ok, who else is twitching after that comment? Mixing up details between the two most sacred geek fantasy universes is driving me nuts.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[A nonymous Coward]

You lose. His goes to 12.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

*dorkhat*

Ding ding, the post-original movies explanation was that the run to kessel involves passing a cluster of supermassive blackholes where the goal to avoid detection as a smuggler was to trim the trip as close to the event horizon as possible without falling past the horizon.

The closer to the event horizon you go, the faster you need to be going to get out again, which requires a higher maximum velocity. Doing so in 12 parsecs is apparently a good indication of a fast ship.

*dorkhat off*

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[TheBig1]

And it would also seem that they go "only" at light speed

While that may be the 'official' back-story, unless the Star Wars galaxy is much smaller than ours, that would be completely impossible. Going at light speed, it would take us about 5 years to get to the nearest star (Alpha Centuri). To cross the galaxy would be about 100,000 years. Nowhere near the few hours to a few days travel times as seen in the movies.

Cheers

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Mister Whirly]

My amp can do it in 11 parsecs.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[jason.sweet]

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for Captain James T Kirk!

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Zenaku]

Whoosh.

This was clearly a reference to the LHC scientist who both misquoted the Star Trek tagline "Where no man has gone before" and incorrectly attributed it to Star Wars.

It is the LHC scientist who needs to turn in his dork card, the GP was just making an allusion to that.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[STrinity]

You measure a Kessel with a vessel, but you fly it with a crew that is true.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Baton Rogue]

The Kessel Run

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[freddy_dreddy]

In 1931 Heinz Hopf found a way of filling up all of space with circles. You can express a measure of volume with distance.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[JesseMcDonald]

Kessel is actually a planet where "glitterstim" (an heavily controlled drug with mind-enhancing powers) is mined. The Kessel Run is a smuggling route from Kessel back to the standard trade routes. The direct path leads through the Maw, a deadly cluster of black holes; all but the most suicidal or desperate keep their distance.

The rest is much as you described -- once, while being chased by Imperial ships, Han takes the Falcon through the Maw to escape. Much to his surprise, he discovers that not only did he make the trip in record time, but in record distance as well -- less than twelve parsecs -- due to proximity to the black holes.

Basics about Kessel, the Kessel Run, and the surrounding region of space can be found in The Han Solo Trilogy, Book #2, "The Hutt Gambit". The record-setting run itself occurs in Book #3 of the same series, "Rebel Dawn".

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[rodney dill]

...only if I convert to Hogsheads per fortnight first.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[JesseMcDonald]

In the Star Wars universe FTL travel is accomplished with the help of a "hyperdrive." Essentially it moves the ship through higher dimensions such that the normal physical laws don't apply, while keeping the ship and its contents isolated from the effects.

A warp engine (from Star Trek) doesn't involve higher dimensions; it creates a bubble-universe (a "warp shell") around the ship. The warp shell negates mass, allowing whatever lies inside it to accelerate to superluminal velocities in real space.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's preposterous. Imperial Star Destroyers use hyperdrive engines, an entirely different technology from the standard Cochrane-style warp drive. And everyone knows that it's impossible to reach warp factor 10. The power curve is obviously asymptotic.

Geez. What sort of physics are they teaching in our our public school systems these days?

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

*dorkhat*

Ding ding, the post-original movies explanation was that the run to kessel involves passing a cluster of supermassive blackholes where the goal to avoid detection as a smuggler was to trim the trip as close to the event horizon as possible without falling past the horizon.

The closer to the event horizon you go, the faster you need to be going to get out again, which requires a higher maximum velocity. Doing so in 12 parsecs is apparently a good indication of a fast ship.

*dorkhat off*

That's a lot of credit to give a guy who didn't seem to understand that a failed hyperdrive meant you weren't going to be going from planet to planet.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

While that may be the 'official' back-story, unless the Star Wars galaxy is much smaller than ours, that would be completely impossible. Going at light speed, it would take us about 5 years to get to the nearest star (Alpha Centuri). To cross the galaxy would be about 100,000 years. Nowhere near the few hours to a few days travel times as seen in the movies.

Well, we do know this:

1.) They use 'light speed' and variants of the term quite a bit in the original trilogy.

2.) Without a hyperdrive, they can still travel from planet to planet without being in transit so long they need to change clothes. (Possibly even system to system.)

3.) You can sit in an X-Wing for a while and go from Tatooine to Degobah without even needing a pit-stop. (Let alone a bunk to nap in.)

4.) A bunch of people were tied up in a net 30 feet (relative) off the ground and dropped, without so much as a broken bone.

The "small galaxy" theory actually nicely tidies up several of these problems, it even provides some motivation for the 'Force' to exist, if you get a little imaginitive anyway.

I've met resistance to this theory, though. It seems some of the fan-base just don't want to entertain any ideas that mean Starfleet could whip the Empire's ass. Personally I think it's a shame. If George had considered the size thing all along, I'd be impressed, even if he did rip it off from HitchHiker's.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[lgw]

Of course, that's all after-the-fact explanation by competent SF writers. Lucas just didn't know that "parsec" was a measure of distance at the time. And that's not the *real* Han Solo trilogy!

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Mechanik]

Apparently, a scientist at the LHC declared that the object is similar to the flash that an Imperial Star Destroyer does when reaching Warp 10.

They've gone to plaid!

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[JesseMcDonald]

Of course, that's all after-the-fact explanation by competent SF writers. Lucas just didn't know that "parsec" was a measure of distance at the time.

Sure, but if you look at it that way they're all after-the-fact. You're free to prefer some other explanation, but this is the one given by the official novels.

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, everyone knows that a Kessel is a measure of volume. Geez.

Is that a nuclear kessel?

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that warp 10 causes you to have kids with the captain...

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[kestasjk]

Either that or the writers screwed up..

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[chdig]

ah, but the kessel's with the maw, in the cluster with the tunnel. It's the kessel in the cluster with the crew that is true!
--

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kessel_Run

Re:That's no moon. It's a space station.

[wolfemi1]

My amp can do it in 11 parsecs.

Well, that's one better now, isn't it?

Won't be too long before we are all

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Bowing to our new intergalactic overlords :-)

Re:Won't be too long before we are all

[mahdi13]

you mean the ones that blew themselves up?

Re:Won't be too long before we are all

[arminw]

or bowing to Jesus Christ who is on His way back to earth.

2 Thessalonians 2:8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the breath of His mouth and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming,

or

Revelation 21:2 And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her Husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of Heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. 4 And God will wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there will be no more death, nor mourning, nor crying out, nor will there be any more pain; for the first things passed away. 5 And He sitting on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And He said to me, Write, for these words are true and faithful.

I wonder how long it will take for this "thing" they saw to get here?

I think this belief beats a belief in an exploding death star!

Re:Won't be too long before we are all

[Cliffy03]

It was the end of the last great time war.

I'm betting

[debrain]

... it's a Bowl of Petunias, or a sperm whale (again).

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

Be sensible. It's probably Abe Lincoln.

Re:I'm betting

[gardyloo]

Oh, Agrajag is going to be even more touchy now.

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it was the Bowl of Petunias that had the "not again" comment...

Re:I'm betting

[rev_g33k_101]

yes, yes it was
"The bowl of petunias was created during one occurrence when the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive was activated. It appeared in mid-air, and promptly fell to the ground and shattered.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that, we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now. "

http://www.hhgttgonline.com/html/petunias.html

"The whale has only one scene in the TV show and movie, but nevertheless he tries to make productive use of his limited time to attempt to come to terms with his existence, naming things that he discovers along the way, such as his tail and the wind whipping past him very rapidly as he approaches the large thing coming towards him very quickly that he names "ground", and wonders to himself whether or not it would like to be his friend."

http://www.hhgttgonline.com/html/whale.html

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a Constructor Fleet enroute. We really should have reviewed the plans at Alpha Centauri while we had the chance...

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

You're my hero

Re:I'm betting

[RheannaDragonclaw]

Or Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater.

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

In all seriousness, it's my dog.

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

"... it's a sperm whale, or a Bowl of Petunias (again)."

Fixed...

Re:I'm betting

[imtheguru]

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was 'Oh no, not again.'

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

>... it's a Bowl of Petunias (again), or a sperm whale.

Fixed that for you

Re:I'm betting

[collinstocks]

Well, we found out why later on in one of the following books. It was a rebirth of the being Arthur kept killing.

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's a Bowl of Petunias, or a sperm whale (again).

To be correct, it should be "... it's a Bowl of Petunias (again), and a sperm whale."

The Bowl of Petunias was killed by Arthur Dent for the second time (though I believe previously it was some sort of rodent creature when he killed it the first time.)

Re:I'm betting

[gadzook33]

What are the odds?

Re:I'm betting

[normal_guy]

That's impossible.

Re:I'm betting

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's a Bowl of Petunias, or a sperm whale (again).

That's the bowl of PETUNIAS again. Damn. Get your facts straight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsK6aRuSBIc

Logical conclusion

[incognito84]

Maybe they should try cleaning off the lens?

Re:Logical conclusion

[ogre7299]

Well, it was observed with multiple telescopes, so it's not an artifact. The full paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf

Re:Logical conclusion

[PPH]

Wiping it with their sleeve might work, but spitting on it while wearing a spacesuit could be a problem.

Squeegee guys in space!

Re:Logical conclusion

[bluesk1d]

When your optics are focused at 11tybillion miles, lens artifacts are not visible/in focus. Even if they were, they do not self-illuminate.

Re:Logical conclusion

[GweeDo]

Hubble doesn't have a lens. It has a curved mirror.

Re:Logical conclusion

[Deliveranc3]

Ok, who RFA...

It just appeared? Breaking the speed of light in it's magnitude?

Seems a bit anti-hawkings now doesn't it.

Galactus?

[Anvil the Ninja]

The Silver Surfer wouldn't be detectable at astronomical ranges.

All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Anonymous Coward]

One shows a million degrees. The others, minus five thousand.

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Yvan256]

Send out a probe.

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Gilmoure]

Fire a spread of missiles at it. That'll destroy it.

Who's up for opera?

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[shrikel]

It's okay to show -5000 degrees; they're just not using any scale we use today. Maybe.

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[cmdr_klarg]

Awesome... just as soon as Bruce Willis is done drilling the asteroid he can swing by, grab Milla Jovovich (who wouldn't want to) and save the world!

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get the pop culture reference, you insensitive clod!

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Nadaka]

negative temperature is real. It is actually hotter than the hottest positive temperature. I imagine it would look something like Jessica Alba in bed with my girlfriend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[orkysoft]

negative temperature is real. It is actually hotter than the hottest positive temperature. I imagine it would look something like Jessica Alba in bed with my girlfriend.

That would be an imaginary temperature...

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jammed? It's raspberry... only one man would give us the raspberry.

Re:All thermal sensors are jammed.

[Xyrus]

Mila Jovovich is now naked and covered in hot corn nuts.

~X~

Aliens must own stock too.

[tjstork]

It's obvious that this was the flash of an extraterrestrial civilization that just destroyed itself when it realized that all of its savings were tied up in Lehman Brothers stock.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[eebra82]

*Bursts out in sporadic laughter*

It's clear to me... I just know... I just know what it is!

*Sporadic laughter again*

This is direct evidence of Xenu's lost civilization.

Best regards,
Dr. T. Cruise

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[ColdWetDog]

You know, for something that is likely to get the already 3/4 paranoid Slashdot audience to not only tape their tin foil hats on with extra duct tape, but to start digging holes in the basement...

It's a pretty lousy picture. All that money for a little black dot. My 10 year old photocopier can do that.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[loftwyr]

That's it! Scientology is wrong! Xemu didn't land here, he landed on that bright light.

The light was the 1000's of nuclear warheads killing off the people on that planet, not this one!

No wonder Scientologists are crackpots. They're looking for theatans that aren't there!

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[rodney dill]

This matter will have be settled in an intergalactic court. My attorney's are experts in this area -- Crane, Poole, and Schmidt.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Joe the Lesser]

Xemu?

Is that the alien that looks like a large flightless bird?

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[nine-times]

Sounds like Gorlock screwed up again.

(Seemed like the obvious connection between the parent post and grandparent post.)

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[k2r]

> My 10 year old photocopier can do that.

Your 10 year old photocopier can reproduce, so you don't have to.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up! Best burn i've seen in a long time...

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Chapter80]

Your 10 year old photocopier can reproduce, so you don't have to.

Reproduction may be possible at that age, but I strongly suggest that you wait 8 more years before putting anything into her paper tray.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[cubiclegangsta]

ROFL! Astrophysicists anticipate widespread contagion in surrounding galaxies, but also express confidence estimating that we will see the universe returning to stability sometime in QTR4... of the year 8 Billion.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Tablizer]

It's a pretty lousy picture. All that money for a little black dot.

It's not *just* an image they have, but apparently they also did some spectroscopy. The Sky-and-Telescope article that somebody referenced below contains this:

"...and a lack of cosmic hydrogen absorption in its spectrum means that it can't be farther than 11 billion light-years..."

(Clouds of hydrogen permeate the universe such that if something is far away enough, then hydrogen "fog" should show up in the spectrum because the volume of fog between us and the object increases with distance.)

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best burn? It doesn't even make sense. I'm guessing it was some sort of takeoff of the "Scrubbing bubbles" commercial "we work hard so you don't have to", but I fail to see how that is a burn, or even funny on any level.

Some posts get +5 Funny for the most ludicrous reasons.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[grahamd0]

No, that's Xodo.

Xemu's not really that impressive. He takes his name from the vast collection NES ROMs on his hard drive.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[ColdWetDog]

Sir:

Do you really think that I am making a coherent comment about the lack of information from the Hubble given that my opening sentence essentially characterizes the readership (and I use that term lightly) of Slashdot as a bunch of paranoid teenagers wrapped in aluminum foil?

Perhaps it did not occur to you that I might have been (albeit apparently vainly) attempting a funny?

This makes me sad.

Re:Aliens must own stock too.

[Tablizer]

The best writers often mix facts and humor.

Ominous!

[Sockatume]

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black body sphere and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

Re:Ominous!

[CdBee]

Time to call up a few friends

Regards

GSV Steely Glint
(cc Fates amenable to change, Ethics Gradient)

Re:Ominous!

[JPRelph]

Certainly Interesting Times...

Re:Ominous!

[torkus]

Random reference leads to...google...leads to new SciFi books to read! Yay!

P.S. If they suck I'm coming back to complain :)

Re:Ominous!

[CdBee]

take care - someone always gets affronted

Re:Ominous!

[khakipuce]

[ tightbean, M16, tra.n4.228.987.193302 ]

X ROU Killing Time

O Steely Glint

On my way ...

I think we should dispatch the nearest LSU

Re:Ominous!

[Anonymous Coward]

You got that backwards. If you come back complaining, you suck.

Re:Ominous!

[arktemplar]

Those who didn't get it - Ian M. Banks has a set of novels set in the 'Culture' universe. There was one called 'Excession'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession

Re:Ominous!

[peacefinder]

And bravo to whomever got the outsidecontextproblem tag to stick.

Probably Meatfu.... I mean, Gray Area messing about.

Re:Ominous!

[Calmaveth]

Until I saw this I thought I was the only one that had - it was the first thing I thought of when I read it...

Re:Ominous!

[SiriusRegalis]

The Culture books are actually some of the best Sci-fi written today.

Re:Ominous!

[footnmouth]

[tightbeam, Mclear, tra. @4.28.891.7352]
xGCU Grey Area
oExcession call-signed "I"

Let's talk shall we

... I'm glad my home network is named after culture ships, unless it's the Affront!

Re:Ominous!

[ElAurian]

You haven't read any Culture novels before? You lu'y, lu'y, bastard!

Re:Ominous!

[orkysoft]

I suppose you have a Reasonable Excuse to read some good literature now. It's Character Forming. I'm not a Recent Convert, but I do think that coming back to complain would be Unacceptable Behaviour, and I'd have to use my Attitude Adjuster in a Frank Exchange of Views. Unless it was an Honest Mistake.

(Yes, I referred to Wikipedia on this one ;-] )

Re:Ominous!

[julesh]

I'm detecting a serious lack of gravitas in this thread.

In unrelated news...

[liquiddark]

The first space janitor has been contracted to clean "several unspecified glass surfaces".

Re:In unrelated news...

[Chris Mattern]

Mike broke the Hubble! Mike broke the Hubble!

Re:In unrelated news...

[ajlitt]

Wrong space janitor. Wasn't Mike some sort of temp worker before being kidnapped?

Re:In unrelated news...

[NeuroManson]

Mike broke the Hubble in MST3K: The Movie.

Guh, can't believe I had to explain that. I'm either very very very smart, or have very very very little of a life.

Re:In unrelated news...

[Rand Race]

Way to go Mike "Destroyer of Worlds" Nelson.

Re:In unrelated news...

[UncleTogie]

Guh, can't believe I had to explain that. I'm either very very very smart, or have very very very little of a life.

Welcome to the state of things on This Island Earth...

look out!

[mustafap]

It's the death star!

McCain...

[gmac63]

I have a theory that we have finally found John McCain's missing personality.

Moondust on the sensor

[srussia]

They should have paid Olympus for Supersonic Wave Filter (SWF) technology.

EVERYBODY RUN!!!

[TheFrunk]

ITS THE GROX!

Stargate?

[bman]

Perhaps the LHC is actually a Stargate?

Re:Stargate?

[Quantus347]

At that size it can only be Supergate poised to bring a crusade of pseudo-christian alien overlords to enslave and annihilate all who will not bow down!

Quick, Call MacGuyver!!!

George Carlin Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

A new "disease" which has no known "symptoms" ...

My keys?

[Pedrito]

Did I leave my keys out in space again? I keep doing that. Sorry.

It's the Primes

[static416]

Anyone read Pandora Star by Peter Hamilton? Let's not investigate this too deeply or MorningLightMountain is going to kick our ass.

Re:It's the Primes

[n dot l]

I loved those books. The whole time I couldn't help thinking, "What an awesome future, tragic that it's only fiction."

Re:It's the Primes

[DamnStupidElf]

"What an awesome future, tragic that it's only fiction."

The future is what we make it. Isn't that the point of scifi?

The 5th element

[webappsec]

For those of you who have seen the movie the fifth element be scared, be very scared.

Re:The 5th element

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? An incredibly gorgeous super weapon will save us. I think those of us who have seen the movie should start looking for a secret temple in Egypt to await her arrival.

Re:The 5th element

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not worried, Corbin Dallas will bone some alien clone chick and save us.

Re:The 5th element

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Lee-Lu scared me too. And she keeps scaring me with every new Resident Evil movie.

Thanks, I'm here all night.

Re:The 5th element

[Walkingshark]

I don't know, I'd rather start working on the T-Virus so that eventually we can repopulate the earth with a race of smokin-hot super-clones.

Re:The 5th element

[dwye]

> For those of you who have seen the movie the fifth element be scared, be very scared.

Why? Is this the start of filming a sequel?

Now THAT would be scary.

Spaceball 1...

[cjh79]

They've gone to plaid!!!

Re:Spaceball 1...

[halsver]

Mm hvving trbble vth da rdar ssr.
What?
I'm having trouble with the radar sir! ... I've lost the sweeps, the creeps and the bleeps!
The what, what, and the what!? ...
The Radar sir, it appears to be...
Jammed! ... Raspberry! There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry! LOONNNESTAAR!
*Gets knocked over by camera on extreme close-up*

FYI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs:_The_Animated_Series

fly on the lens?

[mytrip]

shame hubble doesnt have windshield wipers

Re:fly on the lens?

[AKAImBatman]

If there was a fly on the lens of the Hubble, then we've got bigger problems than unknown objects 11 million light years away!

(Insert "I for one..." meme.)

Re:fly on the lens?

[bigstrat2003]

I, for one, welcome our new meme-inserting overlords!

Re:fly on the lens?

[everynerd]

Or a windshield.

Re:fly on the lens?

[discord5]

Ah godsdamnit, you beat me to it

Re:fly on the lens?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome Carol Vorderman.

in2 my pants

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Fox really outdid themselves this time.

Don't worry, it's just part of the marketing roll-out to the upcoming release.

I know what it is...

[Sooner Boomer]

...that dam' kid down the block with his laser pointer again!

they found God ?

[slarr]

wonder how God looks...

Re:they found God ?

[gardyloo]

When god is a bit more impressive than 21st magnitude, let me know.

Re:they found God ?

[dkleinsc]

Don't worry about god: All you need to do is shoot him with a photon torpedo, and your problems are solved.

Re:they found God ?

[Anonymous Coward]

wonder how God looks...

I just wonder what God needs with a starship.

Chronicles of Riddick 2

[dirtydog]

It's Riddick and the Necromongers coming back for a sequel.

Re:Chronicles of Riddick 2

[jagdish]

AAAAAArgh

Not a sequel, anything but a sequel.

Oblig Tag

[Maestro485]

Thats no moon...

It is probably (or IMprobably...)

[2names]

The Heart of Gold.

Thank you, Douglass, we miss you.

Obvious answer

[bobdehnhardt]

It's a gigantic sphere of single socks, nonworking ball point pens, car keys, reading glasses, coffee mugs....

Well, they have to go somewhere....

Re:Obvious answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a Robert Rankin reader by any chance?

Re:Obvious answer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a gigantic sphere of single socks, nonworking ball point pens, car keys, reading glasses, coffee mugs....

Well, they have to go somewhere....

 
Yes, but where will all the calculators go?

Re:Obvious answer

[stevied]

More likely to be working ball-point pens. The busted ones always seems to boomerang right back onto my desk..

Re:Obvious answer

[booyabazooka]

It's a katamari?

Re:Obvious answer

[Anonymous Coward]

The discoverer's name was Veet Voojagig. Soon after this discovery the object winked out of existence and the second hand ballpoint pen business' inventories sky rocketed. If they ever find the object again they will only find a strange old man who repeatedly claims that nothing was true, though he will later be found to be lying

Re:Obvious answer

[mother_reincarnated]

nonworking ball point pens

Ahh you had me until the pens bit... Everyone knows its the working ball point pens that can never be found.

Re:Obvious answer

[pla]

It's a gigantic sphere of single socks, nonworking ball point pens, car keys, reading glasses, coffee mugs....

Of course, that does lead one to ask about the annual deposit of 60,000 Altarian dollars into the account of the lone inhabitant of a small asteroid, as well as the sudden inexplicable success of the Beeblebrox 2nd-hand ball point pen corporation...

His noodly appendages

[Anonymous Coward]

it must be the flying spaghetti monster!

Probably.

[Markimedes]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's a rock.

Re:Probably.

[blincoln]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's a rock.

A rock that appears suddenly and then disappears later? And is visible from light-years away? And has a spectral signature that doesn't match anything in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? That's some rock.

Re:Probably.

[Spatial]

Being a rock doesn't preclude it from being interesting or exceptional. I'm quite curious even assuming it is 'just' a rock.

Re:Probably.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going with paper. Sorry, I win.

Re:Probably.

[clone53421]

In that case, I'm going with scissors. Sorry, the outcome is now indeterminate...

Re:Probably.

[Loke the Dog]

...

The point is, its not a rock.

Re:Probably.

[gardyloo]

Good old rock, nothin' beats that.

Re:Probably.

[illeism]

Dynamite is obviously going to have to settle this...

Re:Probably.

[XHIIHIIHX]

Ok, it's a big rock.

Re:Probably.

[Quantus347]

In that case, I'm going with scissors. Sorry, the outcome is now indeterminate...

That only works on 'Paper'...

Re:Probably.

[clone53421]

Ok, then who wins?

Re:Probably.

[MBGMorden]

"It's not a tumor!!" - Ahnold

Re:Probably.

[spungebob]

Are you sure?? They're very good scissors...

Re:Probably.

[dimeglio]

Hordes of supermassive black holes in that region of space are orbiting each other. Stars hiding behind them might have attempted "event horizon surfing" unsuccessfully and was then slowly swallowed. Gravity lensing could have further distorted the resulting observation into what was reported. Just like a real surfer: up she goes, rides the wave, then splash.

Re:Probably.

[UncleTogie]

Ok, then who wins?

Entropy, in the long run...

Re:Probably.

[Danny Rathjens]

Light from a supernova elsewhere bouncing off a rock and reflecting in our direction? ;)

Re:Probably.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no rock...
It's a space station!!!

Re:Probably.

[Rebelgecko]

Except paper.

Re:Probably.

[kocsonya]

Maybe it was Great A'Tuin doing a roll, and that's what we saw. The strange spectra, of course, is due to the octarin.

Re:Probably.

[Jor]

Maybe it's slowly rotating and only has one shiny side?

Re:Probably.

[Anonymous Coward]

but everyone knows its elephants all the way!

Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[AKAImBatman]

That's no moon!

Exactly! NASA obviously needs to do a better job of keeping the lense clean. :-P

Joking aside (at least I HOPE I'm joking!), I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event. Given that the "object" was described as suddenly appearing, increasing in brightness, then falling off until it disappeared.

Current physics, to my understanding, postulate that the universe had to have consisted of 50/50 matter and antimatter at the beginning. One of the current puzzles the LHC is trying to solve is, what happened to all the antimatter?

Since this is open space, it stands to reason that clouds of matter and antimatter may still be floating around, undisturbed. If the two attracted each other over a cosmically long period, we may be seeing the resulting fireworks.

That's my best guess, anyway.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Xaositecte]

Maybe it's another Alien civilization that just annihilated itself in nuclear\fusion\antimatter\something hellfire?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I looked at the photos and it is clearly a Death Star being constructed out there.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[g0dsp33d]

False alarm, they forgot to clean the lens.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[flyonthewall]

Sargent got another Halo to self destruct.

Glad to know the flood is that far away!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[qengho]

I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event. Given that the "object" was described as suddenly appearing, increasing in brightness, then falling off until it disappeared.

Sounds more like the deceleration sequence of a Killer probe. Now I don't care about my Lehman stock.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[beetlenaut]

It's a common misconception that the Hubble has a lens. But, like all large telescopes, it has a curved mirror instead.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Pvt_Ryan]

na it's a klingon warship

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[g0bshiTe]

Maybe it's the server of the site after getting /.'ed

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[jellomizer]

Being that our Sun is not visible by the Human Eye 10 light years away. Something within Billions of light years away would be overkillingly huge. I doubt the supernova bomb could do that.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Just Some Guy]

I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event.

That's optimistic. I have to wonder if they found the Higgs boson.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[mrops]

Correction, its an alien civilization that just did their first experiment on the LHC.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Z00L00K]

Nah! - It was someone with a mirror playing games!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[drDugan]

my money would be on a Vogon Construction crew

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Columcille]

Gamma Globula V just ran their first particle collision. Will we learn from their mistake?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[tgd]

There's an LHC joke here somewhere ...

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[MrMarket]

That's no moon!

Exactly! NASA obviously needs to do a better job of keeping the lense clean. :-P

Those darn Water Bears are already causing havoc.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[gd2shoe]

(at least I HOPE I'm joking!)

Well, my new hope is that people will stop making bad puns.

*Runs like mad for the nearest door.*

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[JackassJedi]

It's all just a big simulation. Now that we're on antimatter/matter's-ratio's toes, the simulation is being adapted to show signs as if "it's always been there." Yeah right. We know who you.. err.. well, we know what you're doi.. erm. Something like that!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[smidget2k4]

Maybe another Alien civilization built a LHC!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction number 2:

It's the anti-earth where some anti-men did a LHC experiment at anti-switzerland.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[element-o.p.]

No, I rather suspect it's another alien civilization firing up their equivalent of the LHC.

(yes, in case it isn't blatantly obvious, I *am* just kidding!)

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[A nonymous Coward]

The good news is, it is possible to survive nuclear war for at least 100 days. Bring it on! They were mere aliens -- we puny humans can do better.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[EmotionToilet]

Or some sort of hadron collider that is large, maybe....

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[DerWulf]

how much antimatter would it take to produce such a flash at this distance? Could we tell if this was an antimatter explosion?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[linzeal]

Yeah, but maybe 100's of thousands of neutron stars hurling through space nearly at the speed of light colliding would do it. No one fucking knows what kind of crazy shit aliens have; we don't even know what the United States really has anymore its been decades since nuclear weapon design was being tested for all the world to see; by the way, did you know they are working on antimatter weapons here already? The US Navy started an antimatter initiator program a little after September 11th to make the ICBMs in their boomers even more lethal, isn't that fantastic?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[arminw]

I have to clean the mirrors on my car from time to time. One of them is curved also. So maybe their mirror rather than lens is in need of cleaning.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew our dopplegangers were dumber than us!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[bickerdyke]

lots of.. lots of, baby...

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Prof.Phreak]

Maybe it's another Alien civilization that just annihilated itself

...via their own LHC! Uh, oh!

...or we are seeing space-time reflection of us!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Teun]

Distance vs. intensity.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it is fantastic, you get all that power without any fallout.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[GweeDo]

Bah, they just turned on their LHC.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[lilomar]

Actually, that was us doing our first experiment on the LHC, how we got back in time and so far away... well I guess we'll find out in a few weeks...

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Digital End]

Aliens just turned on their LHC

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[kisrael]

I read that as "Lensman" would would actually be pretty appropriate.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[gral]

No need to worry. We are seeing their version of a collider go online a couple million years ago.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Spaham]

I still wonder why we all talk about this Large Hardon Collector, is this some kind of nympho or somethin' ?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's another Alien civilization that just annihilated itself in nuclear\fusion\antimatter\something hellfire?

Well, it didn't just happen. It must've been 130 to 11 billion years ago.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[lgw]

There's no real point anymore in making a bomb > 1 MT, and those we still have around are just for show. If the military wants an antimatter bomb, it's to make a small yet potent explosive device.

I'm all for the military figuring ut how to make an anti-matter bomb! The military gets more funding for groundbreaking open-ended research than anyone else, and *somebody* needs to figure out how to make and stabilize anti-matter fuel if we're ever going to send a probe to the nearest star.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[olclops]

It has a lens now. Although not originally. NASA had to add a lens element to correct for the mirror aberration.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[lenehey]

It doesn't have an objective lens, but it has internal lenses and optics, and the "retrofit" inserted an additional corrective lens to compensate for improperly preparing the main mirror.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[dvice_null]

Not anymore, as the unidentified object also disappeared by itself.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[camperdave]

Um... the Hubble has a lens as well as a mirror. If you recall, the mirror had a flaw which was corrected by adding a lens to the array.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[borizz]

Your car mirror swats flies all day. The Hubble not so much. ;)

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Myrddin Wyllt]

This clearly shows that someone built a LHC sometime between 130 and 11 billion years before us.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[verbamour]

The shadowy figure waves back at you!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[hairyfeet]

Nah,just some aliens foolish enough to play with Omega molecules. Silly aliens. That or Q's son got bored again. It is so hard to keep an omnipotent teenager entertained these days.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[asCii88]

Correction, it's an alien civilization that did their first experiment on the LHC somewhere between 130 to 11 billion years ago, human time.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[beetlenaut]

That system is no longer there, and it didn't use a lens either: it used two mirrors. All the instruments currently on board were built after the flaw was known, so they correct for it internally.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, maybe it's a laser pushing a ship with a light sail in our direction.

Oh crap.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[ultranova]

There's an LHC joke here somewhere ...

Look, as long as we don't connect it to a sentient computer, it's perfectly safe. Sure, it might kill us all, but at least we don't face the unfathomable horror of being - dare I even say it - slightly bored.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[rkanodia]

Liar. Antiswitzerland couldn't have a budget for fundamental research - all their money would be spent supporting their enormous military in aggressive wars.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

At a production rate of ~10^26 atoms/day for antiprotons for research, it would take waaaaaaay too long to make a worthwile antimatter device. Little alone the containment fie... forget what i said.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[infonography]

Hmmm,

how about;

hubble bubble toil and trouble,
now you can rid this earthy stubble

            Burma Shave

could not think of a good haiku

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[camperslo]

One of the current puzzles the LHC is trying to solve is, what happened to all the antimatter?

It was divided up among investment banks and used as collateral.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[DJStealth]

The lens was clean, the nearby space station had to empty out the sewage tanks, I guess this was the first time it passed in front of the hubble.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[severoon]

Crap!

There goes my tinfoil budget!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[danieltdp]

You mean like this?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[collinstocks]

Ah, so then we can expect that magrathea will be re-awoken so that they can rebuild an exact replica of whatever planet the Vogons destroyed!

Damn Vogon bureaucracy!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[linzeal]

What are you talking about? The high energy gamma radiation is sure as hell going to make a lot of whatever is left after the explosive blast wave radioactive by ionization.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe one of the flies from "Fly Me to the Moon" got stuck on the lens.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Maybe it's another Alien civilization that just annihilated itself in nuclear\fusion\antimatter\something hellfire?

...by firing up their own version of the LHC?

Or for more Twilight Zone points, When the LHC is fully brought online, the result is a spacial-temporal event that blasted the earth through a wormhole, depositing us billions of light-years away and billions of years into the past. We're now seeing the flash from the apocalypse that is about to happen.

Wow. Upon preview, I realize how screwed up the verb tenses are in the above paragraph. I suppose that's to be expected when discussing time travel.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Should have read a bit more. Should have guessed that someone would have posted the same idea a couple of screens down.

Of course, it could be someone that experienced the event described, taking advantage of the chance to steal my joke then go back and post it before me.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[IBitOBear]

No, obviously it was a breakpoint set in the unused section of the heap, set with the intention of finding out why the "universe" process was expanding to fill all available storage even though it was designed as a densely packed array with sparse representation.

That or some cracker was trying to see if the DRM key was there in that wastefully "unused" region so he could copy this whole production onto the media of his own choice.

I sure hope I am not down-sampled into the noise floor in the resulting low-quality torrent.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to wonder if this wasn't a large matter/antimatter event.

Antimatter-matter interactions are easy to identify - you get characteristic 511 keV gamma-rays from electron-positron annihilation. If it was that, they'd have said so by now - assuming that they pointed a gamma-ray telescope at it while it was active.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[moosesocks]

I'd rather keep ourselves confined to Earth for all of eternity than give antimatter to any military force.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Iron Condor]

Being that our Sun is not visible by the Human Eye 10 light years away.

Uh, that can't be right. The absolute magnitude of the sun is something like +4.9 -- that's easily visible to the naked eye at 10pc ( >~30 light years) distance even through an atmosphere like the Earth's.

But of course really bright stars can be a million times brighter and if you ever compare the diameter of a decent telescope to the diameter of a person's pupil (and note that the light collected goes with the square of this diameter) this doesn't exactly mean a whole lot of anything.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[wootest]

Especially their enormous fleet.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[denmarkw00t]

It was actually our own LHC, but in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[techno-vampire]

Current physics, to my understanding, postulate that the universe had to have consisted of 50/50 matter and antimatter at the beginning.

IANAP, but I've read that in extreme conditions, such as obtained just after the Big Bang, there's "a slight statistical bias" towards normal matter, so that there's more of it created than of anti-matter, and what we see now is the result. Alas, I have no cite, (It was in a book I don't have any more, and I'm not sure of the title anyway.) never saw the math and don't know if I'd understand it if I did, so you can take it with as big a grain of salt as you want.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[lgw]

Why? We already have bombs that are big enough (a) to kill us all, so there's no additional risk, and (b) that the military doesn't actually want or need bigger bombs at this point. I'm not seeing a downside.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[WormholeFiend]

Being that our Sun is not visible by the Human Eye 10 light years away.

not to mention that there are no human eyes, 10 light years away, to see it...

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[SmitherIsGod]

"Supernovas are industrial accidents" Arthur C. Clark, Final Odyssey

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[deglr6328]

wrong. The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) package contained only mirrors not lenses that corrected Hubble's vision.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[TapeCutter]

Arms salesman: "This is our new anti-matter bomb, it can blow up half the planet"

Dictator: "Just what I was looking for, I'll take two!"

Appologies to Billy Connelly.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[UberWhack]

NO! It's Hotblack Desiato's ship....

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[ozmanjusri]

If the military wants an antimatter bomb, it's to make a small yet potent explosive device.

I foresee a slight problem with developing a hand-grenade that has a 2km blast radius...

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[NewsWatcher]

I think you will find the Hubble can see a fair bit better than the human eye.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[tftp]

Probably such a powerful grenade could also have a timer... a commando could get to the enemy, throw a few such grenades into the camp and walk away. Half an hour later they will activate, synchronously if you wish.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, finally someone who knows the distance to this explosion!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they ran some large particle collision experiment.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[dynamo52]

I'd rather keep ourselves confined to Earth for all of eternity than give antimatter to any military force.

The simple fact is that if such a technology were ever developed, it will be a government/military force that controls it, at least initially. Any advance of that magnitude would become classified immediately upon development by any responsible government (or even the irresponsible ones for that matter, but probably for entirely different reasons).

Think about it. The established order whatever that may be, even an enlightened democratic system, has an interest in regulating such power. If it were held by any other party, it would be fundamentally dangerous to humanity as a whole.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad I already commented on this thread. This would have gotten a +1 Funny for sure.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Criton]

No it's the Macross dropping out of hyperspace. When it crashes we better reverse engineer it and put up a solar system wide defense to deal with the 457,032 Zentradi war ships chasing it.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone installed Spore on the Matrix

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Hubble has correcting lens in the optical path, installed in orbit, to compensate for some miscalculations done when building it on earth!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[noundi]

It is possible that this is matter-antimatter interaction. However this would raise some questions. This object seems to be large, and since basic physics tell us that you need an equal amount of matter/antimatter for them to completely vanish, otherwise you're left with revenue of either one of them. How can then one object "eat" itself up? There's no sign of any other object there, which there would be since antimatter is just as charged as matter, but the other way around. And last but not least, the annihilation of matter/antimatter result in gamma ray photons being released. This would be clearly visible with Hubble.
--
In space, no one can hear your spleen.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Krupuk]

You mean their SHAB, the Small Hadron Apart Breaker.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[fbjon]

But how could they have an enormous military if no-one is allowed to have guns?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use hand-grenades though? How about an antimatter RPG? Or little flying robots that fly to your enemy (suppose the robots have a 20 km range and the 2 km blast radius GP mentioned).

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[gadget junkie]

Guess what, I might have found the answer!!!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get that number? 10^26 atoms is a lot. Suppose we're talking about hydrogen. 6 * 10^23 hydrogen atoms weigh about 1 gram, so 10^26 anti-protons would be a kilo of antimatter. If we put all that in a bomb and add a kilo of normal hydrogen then E=mc^2 gives us about 180 petajoule (about 43 megaton of TNT) of kaboom.

Containment is a bitch and I find it hard to imagine we really produce 10^26 antiprotons per day.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, antimatter vs. matter annihilation has a distinct spectral signature, i.e. the energy of an electron and a positron is known, and that of any other pairs of antiparticles. Divide by hbar and you know which peaks to look for in the spectrum. So they should be able to quickly check whether some antimatter vs. matter collision is what's going on or not?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even know if Antimatter falls up or down.

Maybe antimatter would fall up on earth, but would fall down on an antimatter planet.

Then all the antimatter would be attracted to other antimatter and all matter would be attracted to other matter. Maybe there was a piece of matter that had been zippped across space so fast that it smashed into a chunk of antimatter despite being repelled by it.

Still, I like the imperial star destroyer theory better.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[ArsonSmith]

Nope they just called the LHC a colider to get science funding. This is actually a Large Hadron Cannon. We just initiated an preemptive strike on a hostile alien world.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[AKAImBatman]

At a production rate of ~10^26 atoms/day for antiprotons for research, it would take waaaaaaay too long to make a worthwile antimatter device.

The military doesn't need to. Antimatter can be used to enhance fission reactions, thus making for smaller and lighter weapons. This also results in a cleaner fission burn, which means less fallout from fusion weapons.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[ParanoidJanitor]

If you ionize something, it does not become radioactive, it becomes charged. Chances are that it'll leave a bunch of high-energy electrons wizzing around, but that won't last long (they'll find something to recombine with very quickly.) High-energy photons like gamma rays also don't stick around too long. Things like unreacted plutonium, however, do stick around for a long time and they do produce gamma rays over an extended period of time. Antimatter would definitely be cleaner, but there's the sticky issue of the cost of producing it and storing it (you can't just put it in a jar, once it touches matter it'll release all of the energy of its rest mass.)

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[HTH NE1]

Anti-matter hand grenade with loud report. Pull pin, throw 1 km, and get 2 km further away.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't Panic !!

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[HTH NE1]

Well, it didn't just happen. It must've been 130 to 11 billion years ago.

Still, in a real, causal sense, it did. Until the light reached us, there was no way it could have affected us any sooner, so it might as well have happened right when we saw it. It only just entered the double light cone of our Universe.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[lgw]

I foresee a slight problem with developing a hand-grenade that has a 2km blast radius...

To reinforce my earlier point: the army has already developed a nuclear mortar with a range shorter than its "blast" radius! You dig a foxhole, load the mortar, jump in the foxhole and bury yourself, fire the mortar, dig yoursef out, and die a few years later from cancer.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[theycallmeB]

Especially their enormous fleet.

Well, yeah. After all, Antiswitzerland would be a low-lying island.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Why bother with an antimatter bomb when a cobalt bomb, a "continent buster", would be good enough for most war purposes?

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Tailsfan]

Well maybe when they repair it, they should check for debris.

Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine!

[Tailsfan]

Maybe there staring at a cosmic string. A verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry long one.

The Borg!

[MarkvW]

It's the Borg! I'm selling my Lehman stock now!

please stop with the inane star wars jokes

[circletimessquare]

what is wrong with you people?

we all know deep in our hearts it is the decepticons

Re:please stop with the inane star wars jokes

[Spatial]

Or worse, Unicron. :(

Re:please stop with the inane star wars jokes

[LuNa7ic]

Nah, its just viral advertising for Joss Whedon's next big project.

Next space walk to hubble...

[WiglyWorm]

Next space walk to Hubble, they should make sure to have the astronauts bring some windex.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

And tag this article "Outside Context Problem".

Galactic Overlord

[lreynolds]

I knew someone had 'Galactic Overlord' copyrighted, and now they're coming to enforce it.

Modding system

[fiannaFailMan]

I do wish the Funny mod wouldn't make so many posts appear so prominently on a thread. Maybe the first few 'funny' modded posts can appear, after than 'insightful,' 'informative' or 'interesting' get priority. I mean, I've read all the posts above and they're very funny (even the /. cliches), but it starts to get a bit old when you scroll all the way down a thread and can't find anything that adds a bit of information to the discussion.

I clicked on here hoping someone with an astrophysics or cosmology background might be able to have a stab and guessing what this thing might be, or have something interesting to say about Hubble.

Re:Modding system

[TheCycoONE]

But there's nothing insightful, informative, or interesting to say. The summary covered that: "they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."

Re:Modding system

[the_humeister]

I clicked on here hoping someone with an astrophysics or cosmology background might be able to have a stab and guessing what this thing might be, or have something interesting to say about Hubble.

hahahahaa!!... Oh wait, you were serious...

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps find a link to the actual paper in question. I agree that funny all to often dominates what would otherwise be an interesting discussion forum.

Re:Modding system

[Tipa]

Can't get much funnier than getting your astronomy news from a gadget site.

Re:Modding system

[tmosley]

I SO wanted to mod this funny.

Re:Modding system

[crow]

You can change your preferences to change how various moderations affect the score. If you are annoyed by funny posts, change the funny moderation to be a -1 instead of a +1.

Re:Modding system

[alta]

What are you complaining, I just had to stop right here to find something 'interesting', and I'm only 2/3rds the way down the page.

Re:Modding system

[Jonny_eh]

How insightful can a comment be when even the NASA astronomers don't know what it is? It's a post of ignorance, i.e. there's nothing more to be said unless someone has more data. The funny's just filling the void that would otherwise be filled with the chirping of crickets.

In the absence of insight, funny wins out.

Re:Modding system

[oldspewey]

it starts to get a bit old

Impatient much? Nobody has even chimed in yet with any Soviet Russia memes or Uranus jokes.

Re:Modding system

[fyoder]

I clicked on here hoping someone with an astrophysics or cosmology background might be able to have a stab and guessing what this thing might be, or have something interesting to say about Hubble.

Or even a link to a credible science source. Googled, but nada. Possibly a hoax?

Re:Modding system

[Bemopolis]

Speaking as someone with an astrophysics background, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is. And likely no one else will unless and until a decent spectrum of the object can be taken. Because, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words (and, if you are diligent, a light curve), a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's an *extremely* distant explosion (perhaps the hypernova of low-metallicity star), based on the weird light curve and the complete lack of an associated visible parent object. But I wouldn't bet more than a beer on that hypothesis.

Re:Modding system

[fiannaFailMan]

I didn't realise a body could do that. Thanks!

Re:Modding system

[Ambiguous Coward]

If you want insightful, informative, or interesting posts, don't read the article within 8 hours of it having been posted. Funny happens now, intellectual discourse happens later. That's simply how it works. If you've ever heard the joke /. tagline, "Slashdot: Yesterday's news, Today," it makes even more sense. Just read today's articles tomorrow and you'll get precisely what you're looking for. :)

-G

Re:Modding system

[Tmack]

Its called User Preferences. Use them, thats what they are for. Set "Funny" to -6, and bump up the "insightful" or "Interesting" ones to your liking. If you want funny, do the opposite.

Tm

Re:Modding system

[amRadioHed]

Why not add a funny moderation modifier in your comment preferences?

Re:Modding system

[Just Some Guy]

I do wish the Funny mod wouldn't make so many posts appear so prominently on a thread.

If that ever changed, I'd stop reading it. I already get all the dry tech news I need, but come to Slashdot for the twisted geek view on things. A huge part of that is a shared sense of humor, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Think of Slashdot as a bar you go to after work. Sure, you'll hear some serious conversations, but you'll hear a lot more people telling jokes and enjoying themselves away from the office.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I wish I could just filter out funny posts. Seems like some of the most interesting /. stories have the lamest stretch of unfunny comments. If I had the mad skillz, I'd make a Greasemony script for it. ...Hmmm ...

Re:Modding system

[Blakey Rat]

I haven't read anything funny yet, despite the massive number of posts with +5 Funny at the top of them. All I've seen is the same old cliched Star Wars and Hitchhiker's Guides we've all seen a million times before, you know the same jokes you yourself came up with in the first 5 milliseconds after reading the headline.

Re:Modding system

[clone53421]

No kidding. I read the summary on the /. front page and thought to myself, "Wow, how boring. Don't think I'll be hitting that article." Then shortly thereafter, "Wait, did they say wild speculation?!" Here I am...

Re:Modding system

[nine-times]

Let's just be happy this isn't devolving into another debate about science/religion.

Re:Modding system

[richlv]

..and your post is so much more useful than all the other ones above it.
i agree with gp. i'd like something like separate thresholds for various post types. i guess i'd set +5 threshold for funny...

Re:Modding system

[drerwk]

Unless the spectra was already taken aren't we out of luck? I thought that it had faded away.

Re:Modding system

[QuoteMstr]

RTFA. Spectra were taken in three separate instances, and it's nothing like what we've seen.

Re:Modding system

[gEvil (beta)]

The funny's just filling the void that would otherwise be filled with the chirping of crickets.

Please tell me more about these space crickets when you get a chance.

Re:Modding system

[fiannaFailMan]

Thanks for the link. I actually had a hard time finding that.

Re:Modding system

[TheRaven64]

The fact that a post explaining that it was impossible to post something insightful was moderated insightful reminds me why I love Slashdot.

Re:Modding system

[G00F]

Just change the reason modifier for funny to -2 or greater.

Help & Preferences > Discussions > Viewing

Re:Modding system

[samkass]

You can go into your Slashdot preferences and change the value assigned to various tags.

I find Slashdot vastly more interesting with "Funny" set to -5.

Re:Modding system

[glwtta]

but it starts to get a bit old when you scroll all the way down a thread and can't find anything that adds a bit of information to the discussion

It's a couple of pixels showing an unidentified object, somewhere in the universe - how much information do you expect /. readers to add?

Re:Modding system

[pgfault]

OK, I'll bite. It's obviously a small Klingon that's been orbiting Uranus for the past 6 months.

Re:Modding system

[hcdejong]

So go to your Preferences page, and set modifiers for the various categories.

Re:Modding system

[meiocyte]

after work?

Re:Modding system

[Hatta]

...After work?

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a spectrum. It doesn't match anything known. The link to the paper is upthread. The object seems to have dimmed down since.

Let us know if you RTFA and have any thoughts

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of Slashdot as a bar you go to at work.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Uranus memes YOU!

Re:Modding system

[X_Bones]

Speaking as someone with an astrophysics background, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is.

Don't worry. Speaking as someone with no astrophysics background whatsoever, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is either.

Re:Modding system

[Lije Baley]

Slashdot is no place for manual-reading freaks like you!

Re:Modding system

[BattleApple]

well you can barely hear them when they're between 130 and 11 billion light years away

Re:Modding system

[I'm not really here]

Cheers! Now where's all that free beer I've been hearing about?

Re:Modding system

[XHIIHIIHX]

In your "customize" settings above at the top left, you can moderate funny down so that interesting is more prominent. Or informative, like this one. Personally I modify funny +1 because the world is so damn depressing otherwise.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

> low-metallicity

You mean places like Topeka, where they never tour?

Re:Modding system

[drerwk]

RTFGP to which I was responding -

...until a decent spectrum of the object can be taken...

He implies that the spectra taken was not sufficient - sharper spectra is always better. And from the arxiv paper, it looks like they could have hoped for better spectra.

Re:Modding system

[Matt Perry]

If you are annoyed by funny posts, change the funny moderation to be a -1 instead of a +1.

Unfortunately you can't do that. You can only apply a value that is added to the posts moderated funny. You can't change the actual value that is applied by a moderation. I wish we could. I'd set funny to zero so funny moderations wouldn't increase the score.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that a post explaining that it was impossible to post something insightful was moderated insightful reminds me why I love Slashdot.

What? That despite this supposedly being a site for reasonably intelligent people, that we still come across as dumb as rocks at times?

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me laugh harder!

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish we could. I'd set funny to zero so funny moderations wouldn't increase the score.

The next time someone tells you that you have no sense of humor, and you begin to protest, remember that you said that.

I wish funny mods would get karma. I come to slashdot for the funny posts. If I wanted to find out more information about that event, there are much better places to go to. Starting with the paper in question.

Re:Modding system

[skidv]

Just set funny to -5 and the most they can ever be valued is 0.

http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm

Re:Modding system

[IronChef]

Think of Slashdot as a bar you go to after work. Sure, you'll hear some serious conversations, but you'll hear a lot more people telling jokes and enjoying themselves away from the office.

And think of the people complaining about jokes here as the coworkers that no one likes, who never get invited to that bar.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

How Score:4, Interesting! Still, I'd rather not subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Modding system

[jhfry]

Look at your viewing preferences page (http://tech.slashdot.org/my/comments)... you can actually apply an adjustment between -6 and +6 to any moderated comment based upon it's moderation.

I would avoid using large adjustments... but a -1 to funny and a +1 to insightful, interesting, and informative can make a huge difference. For example... I don't like that a +1 insightful can be modded down with a single -1 troll or whatever... so having the extra +1 to insightful means that it takes two negatives to offset a positive. It's pretty rare that comment will ever be marked both positively and negatively and not be worth reading.

Additionally, I usually give at least a +1 to Karma, though I have found that doing a +2 for karma nearly eliminates really bad posts when my threshold is at 3 or 4.

Re:Modding system

[Bombula]

There is nothing conclusive in either the article or in the paper it references. However, I agree that it would be fun if there was a little more informed speculation on this exciting stellar mystery and a little less of the "teh LENS is dirty LOLs!1!111" crap.

My money is on this being a stellar collision of some kind. I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell from the reference paper whether this has any of the signs of a GRB, but it could be a merger of a binary system, a merger of several neutron stars, or maybe even the final evaporation of a low-mass black hole.

Any other ideas?

Re:Modding system

[Just Some Guy]

Well, I wasn't going to spell it out, but yeah. I always "hear" those in a nasally voice, usually followed by "we should stop clowning around and get back to work. Please?"

Re:Modding system

[CYDVicious]

What is this after work or away from the office talk?

Re:Modding system

[stevied]

There used to be an option to deal with that, but it seems to have disappeared, sadly ..

Re:Modding system

[Danny Rathjens]

I've applied a -1 penalty to Funny mods in my preferences for many years now. That effectively cancels out one funny mod so multiple people have to have scored it funny to reach my +3 reading threshold even if the poster had a karma bonus.
This particular story is far above the norm for funny mods, though, I must agree. Maybe it might be time to upgrade to a -2 penalty. :)

Re:Modding system

[gknoy]

I view all "funny" articles as modded -2. The net effect is, when I filter at +3, I see the "good" ones, and when I filter at +4 and above I see only posts that are not modded funny.

Sometimes I wish I had an "exclude funny mods" option when filtering a particular thread, since the post count is few enough that I want to read from a lower mod level... but generally when they're that few, I don't mind scrolling past some funny ones.

Re:Modding system

[dastasha]

Long time reader first time poster here. I have thought the same thing myself before now. Tuning in to slashdot is an intellectual exercise for me. When I click an article I do it to see what the smart people think. I do appreciate the sense of humor here but there are better places on the net for a laugh.

Re:Modding system

[joh]

But there's nothing insightful, informative, or interesting to say. The summary covered that: "they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."

OK, here's something informative: Slashdot linked to a Gizmodo article, which made fun of a Sky and Telescope article, which reports about a scientific paper and then 95% of those commenting the Slashdot article never even read the Gizmodo article, 95% of those looking at the Gizmodo article never got as far as looking at the Sky and Telescope article and only about 3 Persons read the actual paper.

Re:Modding system

[cshay]

Yep. As a person who gets very annoyed by bad jokes on slashdot, I subtract 6 from all "funny" posts. And when I am a moderator I mod down any "insightful" or "informative" mods that are really meant to be "funny" moderations.

Re:Modding system

[grahamd0]

You can lower the bonus points for "funny" posts in your preferences.

Re:Modding system

[denmarkw00t]

But I used a preexisting implementation of this new modding system to get here: Page Up/Page Down

Re:Modding system

[El_Oscuro]

This post should have been moderated insightful, not interesting.

Re:Modding system

[Matt Perry]

That doesn't work the way I'm talking about. What I want is for Funny mods to not count towards the total. If a post is posted by an AC (score 0) and is modded funny, insightful, and interesting, then it will have a score of 3. I want funny to count for 0 not +1, thereby giving the post in question a score of 2 when I view it. If I set funny to -5 then something with many +1 insightfuls would get buried if someone added one funny mod.

Re:Modding system

[extrasolar]

Do you want to wear the astrophysics hat today or should I? I could probably do a couple paragraphs or so of plausible sounding nonsense. We'll still need someone else to edit the Wikipedia page.

Good times!

Re:Modding system

[syousef]

Speaking as someone with an astrophysics background, I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what it is. And likely no one else will unless and until a decent spectrum of the object can be taken. Because, whereas a picture is worth a thousand words (and, if you are diligent, a light curve), a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures.

I guess it depends on your definition of decent but here you go:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf

"Multiple spectra show five broad absorption bands between 4100 A and 6500 A and
a mostly featureless continuum longward of 6500 A."

The problem is not a lack of spectra. They don't fit what's known. (However if by "decent spectra" you meanabsorption bands over the entire gamut of wavelengths, don't hold your breath)

Re:Modding system

[Shag]

I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it. :)

A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.

His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.

Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.

Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.

The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think. :)

So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.

Re:Modding system

[craagz]

After work! What are you talking about?? It is the bar I go to during work!

Re:Modding system

[shanen]

Here, here. What I can't understand is why the mods didn't defensively mod you -5 overrated.

Actually, I did recently find out why /. is so unfixable. Apparently at least one of the primary coders is a Bushevik moron. Evidently this is his version of truth, beauty, and the American way.

Re:Modding system

[I don't want to spen]

Crickets are fine. If it's Krikkits - then we're in trouble ...

Re:Modding system

[amorsen]

There's nothing nearby. Random stars away from galaxies happen, but they're exceedingly rare. Two wandering stars colliding?

Re:Modding system

[complete loony]

The fact that a post describing how another post that explains that it was impossible to post something insightful and yet was moderated insightful was itself moderated interesting reminds me how much I love to post a follow up comment with a similarly convoluted sentence structure and get moderated funny.

Re:Modding system

[noundi]

Well how hard can it be? NASA scientists don't hold the monopoly of cracking astronomy puzzles.

Often the answer is right under your nose and I've been doing some research right here on /. to see if any recent events might be related to this. Here's my conclusion:

The internet is a series of immortal water bears whom just recently filed for Lehman Brothers. I think.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

I do wish the Funny mod wouldn't make so many posts appear so prominently on a thread.

You may wish to take a look around in your preferences. You may find something there that will help you.

Re:Modding system

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet slashdot the insightful mod you.

Re:Modding system

[TMB]

That's not true - they do have some clues. They know how long the event took, they know it has broad absorption lines, they know it slightly changed colour during the event, they know it brightened by at least a factor of 100, and they know that the object is normally very faint. They haven't come up with a scenario that explains all of those facts, but they put limits on what sorts of things do and don't make sense.

Re:Modding system

[eric-x]

I think it would be a good idea to limit moderators to one funny point. That will make them think twice before modding up the next lame joke.

Re:Modding system

[Freddy Fantabulous]

As much as I enjoy a good laugh, the predictable "Funny" posts on /. starting waring thin about a decade ago. Folks want to be modded up and it's much easier to rattle off a joke than an "Insightful" or "Informative" comment. It's also much faster to write a one line joke than something more substantial. Since the surest way to get modded up is to be one of the first few posts, the optimum strategy if one wishes to be modded up is to write a joke quickly before even reading TFA... a perverse incentive if ever I saw one.

There is an option on the comment settings page http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm that lets one set modifiers for each quality of comment. I set all "Funny" posts to -6 long ago and now the comments are the best part of /.

Re:Modding system

[dotancohen]

...but it starts to get a bit old when you scroll all the way down a thread and can't find anything that adds a bit of information to the discussion.

1

Re:Modding system

[RockDoctor]

and only about 3 Persons read the actual paper.

4 now.

Re:Modding system

[mmwithpeanuts]

I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it. :)

A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.

His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.

Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.

Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.

The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think. :)

So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.

A neutron star farting out gas, which caught fire from a tiny spark created by a neighboring EM field, lasting one hundred days?

Re:Modding system

[Shag]

A neutron star farting out gas, which caught fire from a tiny spark created by a neighboring EM field, lasting one hundred days?

It's not my explanation, and I'm not an expert, but I think "accreting" is rather different than "farting out." :)

If a neutron star, white dwarf, or whatever, can gravitationally pull enough stuff onto it to start up fusion (or deflagration-detonation) you can get something kinda sorta like this.

Re:Modding system

[mmwithpeanuts]

Perhaps, it could have been the collision of a dark star with a black hole, something quite unusual in terms of happenings in our universe, and especially in observations by us. I didn't read the whole report about what the Hubble saw, but know what ever they saw was not something that has ever been observed before. THe lack of gamma from this collision could be explained by the swallowing of hole, while igniting at the event horizon into a strange mix of particles, some not their own, as the appetite of the hole would bring yet other strangers in.

Re:Modding system

[mmwithpeanuts]

By the way, I do like your neutron star theory. Who knows what it was? IN our strange universe, it could have been the failure of the CERN seen coming back to us before it happened (this I write more in jest, though).

Scooped!

[LaminatorX]

I'm picturing a staff meeting at Engadget where the editor is yelling, "If Gizmodo beats us to press with a previously unknown class of celestial object one more time, heads are gonna roll around here!"

Race to theorize

[Itninja]

Whatever it is you can bet the scientist community will be quick to publish a theory as to its' identification. And that theory will be immediately disseminated to the public as a fact. And then any following theories (even more plausible ones) will be discarded as foolish.

Re:Race to theorize

[zappepcs]

And this goes to show? IMO, it shows that humans are simply not designed to comprehend something that can explode with that kind of magnitude. I'm not saying no one here is smart, but this sort of thing just isn't on the radar of our day to day lives.

Some of the comments I read, offering options of super massive black hole imploding to our universe bumped into another universe are interesting. Both things we've never seen before, so would not know what they look like. Speaking of that, there are a LOT of things we've never seen before, so I'm sure there are more out there and perhaps this one is something that happens quite a bit more often than we would imagine. Despite the LHC jokes here, this is one reason to justify the efforts that they are laboring with at the LHC. Understanding these things needs a complete understanding of matter and how the universe works. There are a lot of reasons for wanting to know. Our fuel source for the 23rd century might actually be mined from the outer planets... once we get the space travel/survival thing down a bit better.

What exactly happens when you spill a big barrel of anit-matter in the lab?

Re:Race to theorize

[ceoyoyo]

"will be discarded as foolish..." by the public.

Yeah, could be. An excellent argument for better education leading to a smarter public, and better science journalism.

Re:Race to theorize

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

it shows that humans are simply not designed to comprehend something that can explode with that kind of magnitude

Humans weren't designed, they evolved. And in the last few millennia they've additionally developed a whole bunch of techniques ranging from counting to computer programming that allow them to extend the domain of things they can think about way beyond what humans were thinking about previously. I have no idea how far this will go in the future, but what humans were 'designed' to do is irrelevant to the amazing things that humans are capable of doing today, and a very misleading metaphor to use (assuming you mean it as a metaphor). Maybe you're talking about limitations on what your own brain can do, but don't assume those limitations apply to other people. Dealing with large numbers is something many humans have been very good at for a long time.

What exactly happens when you spill a big barrel of anit-matter in the lab?

For one thing you can expect a vast amount of gamma radiation with a very characteristic signature. There would be little chance of confusing it with anything else. You'd need more than a barrel for it to be visible at a few hundred light years though.

No 2001 comments yet?

[mrloafbot]

Monolith? Anybody check the moon for any radio burst? :)

Re:No 2001 comments yet?

[Eudial]

My god! It's full of stars!

Loop

[halcyon1234]

It's the Universe's backup of itself. It would store it offsite, but it's kinda hard when everywhere is here.

Re:Loop

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the in-filesystem log of the metadata in our WABPL-enabled universe.

That's no Space Station, that's an LHC

[CorporateSuit]

a scientist at the LHC declared

LHC scientists then assured the public that it was not an LHC being used on a different planet by an alien civilization, then being burned in a fierce flash of particle fusion before being enveloped within a subsequent black hole. "The chances would be like winning the lottery ten times in a row" they said. "Not that we would know about any alien civilizations, their freaky purple skin and glowing eyes, or whether they were using an LHC modelled after the one we made on Earth. Speaking of which, I'm not really qualified to talk about it, because this is astronomy and has NOTHING to do with LHCs... Ha ha right? No more questions."

Next week, a new LHC song is promised from the CERN labs and should be another smash hit on Youtube. One of the scientists sung a few of the lines to us as a preview. "We didn't share our technology with a now-extinct alien race less than a few lightyears away. They were probably pretty dumb and annoying anyway. Let's turn this bugger on! Let's turn this bugger on! Smash some particles, yeah!"

Re:That's no Space Station, that's an LHC

[Gilmoure]

Man, I can't wait until they start whizzing dinosaurs around that ring and smack 'em together.

Re:That's no Space Station, that's an LHC

[lgw]

Large Hadrosaur Collider?

Re:That's no Space Station, that's an LHC

[TheQuantumShift]

Perhaps it's an echo into this universe from the one where the LHC really did end it all...

Re:That's no Space Station, that's an LHC

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it was a LHC on a distant planet. But it was not the LHC that caused the explosion of that planet, it was all the idiots who feared the LHC and thus started a war to stop the scientists, which caused the military morons to nuke their planet and finish off their civilisation for good.

Explains the IR spectrum, btw.

Gates/Seinfeld?

[jmhowitt]

Could be the next Gates/Seinfeld ad?

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

The Intergalatic Post reports Darth Vader says "Death Star nearly complete--this time young Skywalker will pay". Neither Luke Skywalker nor Princess Leia responded to the request for comment.

Beam me up!

[Kingrames]

Please!

A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[bradbury]

A Matrioshka Brain decloaking (tilting the orbiting computronium so it is parallel to the direction of star-to-earth line of sight rather then perpendicular) would fit the bill. But if it has disappeared again they need to go looking for it with their best IR telescopes and I suspect the observing time committees aren't going to be in a rush to approve time to look for a Matrioshka Brain. :-(

Physicists, and to a lesser extent astronomers, have a real problem starting with the assumption that the universe may be populated by species which have evolved there technology and intelligence to the limits allowed by physical laws...

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[Eighty7]

Physicists, and to a lesser extent astronomers, have a real problem starting with the assumption that the universe may be populated by species which have evolved there technology and intelligence to the limits allowed by physical laws...

Huh?? Why in Zeus' name would you start out from that assumption when there's no evidence for it at all?

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[orkysoft]

But if it's 11 billion years away, it happened in a very young universe with much fewer heavier elements, making it a lot less likely for life to have developed back then.

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[DerekLyons]

Physicists, and to a lesser extent astronomers, have a real problem starting with the assumption that the universe may be populated by species which have evolved there technology and intelligence to the limits allowed by physical laws...

That's mostly because there isn't any known way of breaking physical laws. Every example discovered to date has turned out to be evidence that we failed to understand the law completely, not that it was broken.
 
Not to mention that a Matrioshka Brain at best merely bends the laws a touch, not breaks them.

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[bradbury]

Largely due to claims of a sudden appearance and the fact that astronomers don't have another explanation. I've been to 2 gravitational microlensing conferences attempting to convince astrophysicists that they should consider that the microlensing objects (large invisible masses) could be Matrioshka Brains. They don't simply reject the idea. The reject it with extreme prejudice. That is in spite of the fact that the eventual development of molecular nanotechnology makes the development of Matrioshka Brains a very short project (100-1,000,000 years) on astronomical time scales.

To assume that there are not Matrioshka Brains out there you are forced to assume that *we* are the only intelligent technological species in the universe (within say 5 billion light years) and I don't notice astrophysicists writing a lot of papers which make that assertion!

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[bradbury]

I agree that one should not violate known physical laws. And Matrioshka Brains don't really bend any laws of physics, they simply stretch technology, primarily molecular nanotechnology, to its proposed limits. There are serious scientists, such as Smalley and Church who find such stretching implausible. But there are others such as Drexler, Merkle, Hall, Freitas (and myself) who simply believe it is a matter of development.

But technology is on a roll. Look at the decline in costs of sequencing an entire mammalian genome (the latest number I've seen is $60K) and the predicted decline in costs (to a few thousand $) over the last decade. And now we have several efforts to put together synthetic genomes and even synthetic life. Molecular nanotechnology largely suffers from not enough people really understanding it (and failing to understand its implications). Once you get over those hurdles then the big questions revolve around how many "good" planets are there (and we will likely have start getting hard answers for that in the next decade) and is "intelligence" (and potentially technology) particularly common?

Re:A Matrioshka Brain decloaking

[bradbury]

I agree. But work by Lineweaver's group suggests that ~70% of the Earth-like planets in nearby galaxies are older than the Earth. In nearby galaxies there are sufficient heavy metals to enable an Earth-like biolological system.

I would put decreasing probabilities on the development of any intelligent/technolological life on systems older than say 9 billion years. But we only have an example of 1 to base any assumptions on. We have no idea whether our experience is a lucky shot at the start of the curve, a late comer that got shot down again and again, or a typical "average" developmental path for intelligence and technology. And intelligence may not be the critical aspect. Dolphins, whales, elephants and parrots may be "intelligent". What appears to be critical is whether you have the means, skills and need to develop tools and eventually advanced technologies.

Is it a cylinder?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAMA!!

Sky and Telescope Article

[Quantum Jim]

The Sky and Telescope article is much better than the Gizmodo blog. The article explains why it can't be closer than 130 ly due to no parallax, though IDK why they didn't use a more sensitive satellite for measuring parallax of objects up to 1600 ly away. Maybe it was only seen after the fact, or the other satellite was not sensitive enough? The thing could not be farther than 11 billion ly either, since otherwise the light would be distorted as it passed through interstellar hydrogen clouds (i.e. "cosmic hydrogen absorption in its spectrum"). The Sky and Telescope article even includes a reference to the original paper describing the phenomenon. I suggest you read that article instead. It is much more interesting!

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[beetlenaut]

There was a satellite (called Kepler) that could measure parallax out to about that far, but it takes too long. The baseline it used between the two angle measurements was 300 million kilometers--the diameter of Earth's orbit. It got that baseline by simply waiting six months! This thing wasn't there long enough. (Even if Kepler were still operational.)

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[drewzhrodague]

Are they looking at this thing with their eyes, or with software? I realize there is some sort of processing in order to get an appropriate image out of the telescope. I also wonder how many users are pouring over the images they produce, if indeed they do publish them all. My SO does image analysis on cells, identifying where a chemical label is being transmitted (florescence and electron). She does this with her eyes, and there isn't any automation. It would seem that a similar and equally rudimentary shape-detection software should be able to pick things like this our of larger gobs of data. Compare this with an index of known object-locations. I can't imagine this would be so far fetched that they can't automate this kind of detection.

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[klocwerk]

The percentage of astronomy done with absolutely live data is a VERY small part of the whole of the field.
Usually these things are found in older data, you say "hey, this is interesting" and then try to line up time on instruments to investigate them further. I'd assume that this is an anomaly found in some older data, and that no other instruments were pointing at that very tiny section of sky at the time.

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[Therefore I am]

But whatever it was, it happened so long ago and so far away that it is of interest only to scientists. If we see another one, very much closer, we will certainly learn a great deal more.

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[MrKaos]

The Sky and Telescope article even includes a reference to the original paper describing the phenomenon. I suggest you read that article instead. It is much more interesting!

thats a lot of words for "dunno"

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[amorsen]

They caught it in time, and other observatories saw it too.

Re:Sky and Telescope Article

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an interesting phenomenon, something we can't investigate further because it's gone, but the facts remain:
1) a small source of light appeared
2) a long way away
3) then disappeared
4) ???

A clear sign of measureable matter, so was this dark-matter showing itself? I point you to 4)

Based on past experience, I'm fairly sure...

[bugeaterr]

...It's the size of Texas, sir!

(and oddly, enough shaped like Rhode Island, go figure.)

battlestar?

[lucky130]

I'm just going to go ahead and assume it's a Cylon base ship jumping around.

There could be a very simple explanation

[mikvo]

My 18-month old has been depositing random items in random places lately. I'll look around and see if I'm missing anything again today.

Holy crap!

[marco.antonio.costa]

Rama's coming, boys. :)

Uh Oh...

[dhj]

That's what happened the last time a civilization constructed a 14 TeV large hadron collider! I need some protection. Where's my tinfoil hat!

Re:Uh Oh...

[Thelasko]

That's what happened the last time a civilization constructed a 14 TeV large hadron collider! I need some protection. Where's my tinfoil hat!

Or worse, it's a wormhole looking at ourselves in the near future.

Re:Uh Oh...

[molotovjester]

I think we are witnessing our own selves blowing up. Literally. Due to the nature of the universe, we are looking at an extremely long hall of mirrors, which wraps back upon itself. What we see is either our past, or our future, depending on our frame of reference (which direction you are looking in the hall of mirrors).

In this case, it is (obviously) not our past. The event that was witnessed was 31 light-days away. The same amount of time until the LHC creates the first 5Tev collision...

Is this for real???

[jstott]

Is this blog post for real, or is it just a way to grab some traffic and ad revenue?

I can't find a likely looking original article on the astro-ph preprint server, nor on the Astrophysics Journal site [subscription required?]. Furthermore, the researchers who made this alleged disocovery aren't credited or even mentioned in the blog post, so there's no names to Google for ("hubble AND unknown" only comes up with the original article). Does anyone know the original source, or this just some blogger's idea of a joke?

-JS

Re:Is this for real???

[ceoyoyo]

Look a few posts above. There's a link to a Sky and Telescope article with a link to an arxiv paper.

Re:Is this for real???

[Gordo_1]

Here you go: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf

Re:Is this for real???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, google isn't the best way:

Slashdot article link:
http://gizmodo.com/5049896/hubble-finds-unidentified-object-in-space

Sky & Telescope link from above:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/28244844.html?pageSize=0

Original Paper link from Sky & Telescope above:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf

Re:Is this for real???

[jfengel]

Damn it, I just ran out of mod points. Instead, you're just going to have to accept my gratitude (and my hope that somebody with mod points will reward the first post to contribute some actual knowledge to the thread.)

Re:Is this for real???

[modemboy]

Better art

Speck of dust on the lens...

[PortHaven]

Betcha... *lol*

Re:Speck of dust on the lens...

[noc007]

I came here to say the same thing. I would LMAO if it was true too.

Attention Deficit--ohh Shiny Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile...about a half a dozen ADD astronomers are preoccupied with this new shiney thing, another five decided to go ride bikes.

Here we go

[ntshma]

Looks like some other civilization just turned on their new LHC too.

Re:Here we go

[clone53421]

And by "just", you mean "between 130 and 11 billion years ago"...

Re:Here we go

[ntshma]

Well... since no one really knows what might happen they might not have even turned theirs on until tomorrow.

Re:Here we go

[clone53421]

I really don't know how to answer that.

Space is Awesome!

[tambo]

Kind of makes you want to...

...break into song?

I love the black holes,
I love the quasars,
I love gas giants
And both the moons of Mars!
I love the Oort Cloud
And all the "billion stars!"
Boom de yada, boom de yada,
Boom de yada, boom de yada...

I love big telescopes
And supercollider rings,
I love dark matter
And six-dimension strings!
This space is awesome
It's our Final Frontier!
Boom de yada, boom de yada,
Boom de yada, boom de yada...

- David Stein

Best approach

[DoofusOfDeath]

Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

Fortunately, with Bush in office, we can count on a simple, direct solution that's unencumbered by a lot of scientifical mumbo-jumbo. We'll send someone out to check. Sitting on earth, just looking at it with telescopes is the Democratic way.

Hey, you kids! Get away from there!

[Anonymous Coward]

Brings to mind one of my favorite SNL skits. Steve Martin and Bill Murray looking off stage and riffing on the line, "What the H**L is that??"

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/79/79awhatthehell.phtml

Serious guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't it be a new star forming? I don't think we've ever witnessed a star being born before, so its early days as it starts fusion and begins emitting light could look like nothing we've ever seen before. It might wink on and off like a baby taking its first steps.Just a college student's guess.

Re:Serious guess

[Anonymous Coward]

stay in college

Re:Serious guess

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Star formation models have been worked on for many decades now. This event bears no similarity to anything like that. Honestly, astronomers do occasionally spend a little time thinking about things like star formation.

Re:Serious guess

[Tablizer]

Couldn't it be a new star forming?

This is probably ruled out for two reasons. First, there's no detectable nebula in the area. Stars usually form out of dust or plasma clouds. The brightness magnitude at its max suggests that its near our galaxy if its a star, meaning its mother nebula should be detectable if it had one.

Second the spectrum does not match any known object, according to the Sky and Telescope article somebody linked to. They've studied birthing stars such as those in Orion, so the spectrum of such would be an approximate match.
     

Re:Serious guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomers have observed nebulae (stellar nurseries) and their resident protostars, T Tauri stars, Herbig stars for decades now.

Re:Serious guess

[NemoinSpace]

haha, or dropout. at least you'll save some money. :)

Re:Serious guess

[amorsen]

Stars are formed in clouds of gas. Otherwise they have nothing to form from. This object isn't near anything else, so it would have to be the first star forming in a gas cloud -- unlikely. Also, hydrogen should be clearly detected in the spectrum.

Makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

At 11 billion light years out, he would have had to lose his personality well into his late 20's.

Re:Makes sense.

[gd2shoe]

Must... not... feed... AC... Troll...

Ghaaah!!!

ooh, I know! a spare box of Higgs bosons!

[swschrad]

check the mailing label, we might find the rest of the dark matter. thanks, Hubble scientists!

Three words:

[AJWM]

"Warp core breach"

I know exactly what it is...

[HydraSwitch]

It's the universe's belly button!

Re:I know exactly what it is...

[mmwithpeanuts]

It's more like the universes butthole, blasting out gas, which caught fire in some electromagplasmic field.

It looks like...

[jmcwork]

a giant Big Boy!

It's been there all along.

[Thelasko]

It's so far away, that it's light finally reached earth.

In other words, it was beyond the particle horizon and now it's not.

Re:It's been there all along.

[MozeeToby]

Except that the source couldn't have been more than 11 billion light years away (No distortion from intergalactic hydrogen) and the particle horizon is 13.6-13.9 billion light years away. Plus the fact that it faded away after about 100 days would seem to indicate it was some kind of event, not just an object.

Re:It's been there all along.

[Thelasko]

Except that the source couldn't have been more than 11 billion light years away (No distortion from intergalactic hydrogen) and the particle horizon is 13.6-13.9 billion light years away. Plus the fact that it faded away after about 100 days would seem to indicate it was some kind of event, not just an object.

Ok, ok, I admit it. I didn't RTFA.

Re:It's been there all along.

[mmwithpeanuts]

Perhaps, it is some large black hole that swallowed up something such as a galaxy, which we could not see, because of its small size, or position behind the hole; but once it was swallowed, it became visible as it burned into the event horizon? Perhaps, it was the explosion of a dark star. Perhaps, what we witnessed was time/space/matter in backward sequence, instead of spewing things out, almost everything was inverted? Perhaps, it was an alien civilization communicating with us. One hundred days it came and went, leaving behind a code?

I bet...

[javilon]

... its dimensions are 1 by 4 by 9

Re:I bet...

[An ominous Cow art]

How naive to think that the ratio stops there.

(apologies if I misquoted the book; I last read it probably 30 years ago)

Re:I bet...

[pitchpipe]

... its dimensions are 1 by 4 by 9

Cubits? It is the Ark of Ahno who's planet is currently experiencing some technical difficulties because of their refusal to teach High IQ Planet Modeling to their younglings. Also, their leader, Rackob Myamba, refused to stop funding Root Pod research. Take heed!

Re:I bet...

[TheRaven64]

Why do you think the series stops there?

Re:I bet...

[arktemplar]

Do you think it stops just there ? 16 by 25 by 36 ....

Re:I bet...

[Ibiwan]

How naive, to assume that the sequence stops there...

Re:I bet...

[nku]

Duh! Everyone knows it is 1 by 4 by 9 by 16 by ....

Its Fred Hoyle's

[Lawrence_Bird]

Black cloud!

Black, rectangular and full of stars?

[ivanmarsh]

If we're going to investigate, I'm on vacation that week.

It's the Wolves

[DogDaySunrise]

Nah, it's more likely to be a trap placed there to entice intelligent life to its doom by warring aliens thousands of millenia ago - as shown in Alastair Reynolds' historical documentary 'Revelation Space'.

Re:It's the Wolves

[TheRaven64]

So as long as we avoid the greenfly we'll be fine? And if we don't, is it too early to sign up with the conjoiners?

It was Sam.

[www.sorehands.com]

It was Major Carter, exploding another star.

Once you blow up one star, they expect everything from you.

Re:It was Sam.

[Ucklak]

Or was it Major Havoc leaving an exploding space station?

How long until the creationists come out to play?

[Jason Levine]

Come on, something that science can't explain (yet)? This is a perfect moment for all of the creationists to jump up and down shouting: "See? We *KNEW* it! Science has no answer for this! That means science doesn't know anything and thus the Big Bang, Evolution, and all of those things never happened. Clearly this unidentified object shows that the Universe was created 6,000 years ago by Jebus, the hovering rigatoni creature!"

Whiner

[orasio]

I happen to like it the way it is.

Funny is already not rewarded with karma. That helps drive away karma-whoring funny comments from the top of the page. That should be enough for general consumption. If you want it to be different, just change your preferences not to give points to funny comments.

Physics + Biology

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps slashdot shouldn't do physics or biology stories because the readership has nothing to say about these fields.

And look forward to working in their sugar mines.

[JeffSchwab]

I, for one, welcome our new unidentified overlords.

Well, Good

[Foobar of Borg]

Since there are now about 100 idiotic "joke" comments on this thread, perhaps I can put in a serious note. Hubble finding something presently unidentifiable is fantastic. One of the best things you can hear in scientific circles is something along the lines of "What the hell is that?"

Re:Well, Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It is fantastic, but doesn't offer much to talk about. If professional astronomers don't have a clue what it is, there's little hope the Slashdot crowd will figure it out for the thread's duration.

Re:Well, Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Exciting but there's a 99.999999999% chance that it's nothing special. Just something too far away to be recognized for what we would normally see.

Re:Well, Good

[Bucc5062]

Sorry for the humour but...

What's the last words of a southern redneck?

Hey Bubba, watch this!

Somehow I am not comforted when a scientist exclaims "what the hell is that?". In most SciFi movies the next scene is an explosion viewed from very far away.

As a science fan I do agree this is exciting and I hope the science community can come up with plausible theories that can be discussed. Till then I do need to find my duct tape and tinfoil.

Re:Well, Good

[gEvil (beta)]

One of the best things you can hear in scientific circles is something along the lines of "What the hell is that?"

I agree that it can be a good thing to hear every now and then. But trust me when I tell you it gets really annoying when it comes out of your co-worker's (or even worse, your boss's) mouth every few minutes.

Re:Well, Good

[Todd Knarr]

"The most exciting phrase in science, the one that heralds a new discovery, is rarely "Eureka!" and more often "That's funny. It's not supposed to do that..."."

Re:Well, Good

[Yvanhoe]

I wonder what is the probability of it being a Hubble artifact. There were some jokes about dirty lens, isn't that possible ? Something that stuck to the lens then unstuck after 100 days ?

If not, isn't it possible that it is simply a supernova of a new kind ? They say it just appeared but wouldn't a powerful and distant-enough supernova be visible while its parenting star would be too faint for being detected ?

And, of all the SF hypothesis out there my favorite is : "this is a hole in a Dyson sphere"

Re:Well, Good

[XHIIHIIHX]

Since there are now about 100 idiotic "joke" comments on this thread, perhaps I can put in a serious note. Hubble finding something presently unidentifiable is fantastic. One of the best things you can hear in scientific circles is something along the lines of "What the hell is that?"

Depends if we're talking Hubble Telescopes, LHC Colliders, or Nuclear Power Stations.

Re:Well, Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way to achieve the same result is to pull out a vagina.

Re:Well, Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the scientists have no idea what it is. Any decent Christian could tell you it was God.

Re:Well, Good

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you suspect a suddenly appearing object bright enough to be seen 130 light years away before fading away is?

Re:Well, Good

[vegiVamp]

Not at the LHC facility, it isn't.

Re:Well, Good

[Jor]

It's also often the last phrase a scientist utters...

Re:Well, Good

[amorsen]

The object was watched by other telescopes. Could be a supernova, but astronomers know how a supernova spectrum looks, so that is pretty much ruled out too.

It's Evil!

[MikeyToo]

Where is Korben Dallas when you need him?

Gamma rays and other frequencies

[In hydraulis]

This object supposedly faded into existence over 100 days or so, and then took just as long to fade. I'm curious to know what frequency was the most intense during this time.

Did we observe anything with our other space telescopes? Gamma ray burst?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst_progenitors

There are astronomical phenomena we've theorised to exist, but so far have had little if any observations of such. Take this little beauty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark-nova

Okay, so our astrophysicists are throwing that one out there. Perhaps we have seen a few - SN2006gy, SN2005gj, SN2005ap - but maybe we're kidding ourselves, and this is the Real Thing.

What do we call it when a quasar effectively goes supernova? (Not hypernova, that is reserved for very large stars.) Could a quasar even do this?

Perhaps what we've witnessed is the formation - or destruction - of a truly exotic object. And no, we don't have to resort to Dark Matter.

Re:Gamma rays and other frequencies

[gcranston]

mod up informative.

ob: Star trek

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnn!

Any connection to the "oh-my-god" particle?

[Ihlosi]

I wonder. As far as they know, there was nothing particular in the direction that said particle came from. Might there be any connection to this "event"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_Particle

Vogon constructor fleet

[MadMidnightBomber]

Your planet is scheduled for demolition in approximately five of your earth minutes.

The plans *have* been in the local planning office at Alpha Centauri you know - if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout.

It's the alien probe watching CERN

[roguegramma]

It's the alien probe watching CERN, so they can get a good movie when we blow up our planet.
Actually one would send 4 probes to get a view from each angle, so you know where to look for more ;-)

See also: http://www.everything2.com/node/1955248

intelligent discussion...

[X0563511]

So many crap comments! Jesus, keep it all in one thread guys!

Smudge on the lens...

[DirtySouthAfrican]

...or dirt on the sensor.

I know what it is

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a dot on a piece of paper.

windex

[hansoloaf]

hopefully the next space shuttle mission in Oct will bring Windex.

Reapers

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely that wasnt a Mass Relay?

Also obligatory

[Jabbrwokk]

It's not a giant black monolith, is it?

Russell

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a teacup. God exists.

Spitzer Telescope

[JayAitch]

Don't they usually point the Spitzer telescope to confirm Hubble's findings? According to the Sky and Telescope article this was brightening for 100 days. Seems like plenty of time to point another telescope at it.

Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe the Loxians where testing their atom collider.

OMG GUYS ITS THE...

[Verdatum]

GUYS! It's the *INSERT "random ultra-geeky sci-fi reference that may or may not have been mentioned a thousand times in comments above" HERE* !!! good thing about that *INSERT "obligatory unfunny reference to the recent Lehman bankruptcy protection announcement" HERE*!!! ROFLCOPTR!

It was just too tempting...

[bluesk1d]

I guess they turned up their LHC to 11.

Rama is inbound!

[macraig]

And wouldn't ya know Mr. Clarke isn't around to warn us! Is this Rama I, or did we miss the first one?

No idea what it is...

[Anonymous Coward]

but it arrives next Tuesday

Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's a dyson sphere.

You guessed it!

[Todd Fisher]

It was Frank Stalone.

Unicron?

[crankyspice]

Aw, shit...

Ahoy?

[Nembi]

"Hubble caught a spark that continued to brighten during a 100-day period, peaking at the 21st magnitude, only to fade away in the same period of time."

Sounds like an interstellar lighthouse to me!

Oblig.

[discojohnson]

I have some tin foil hats for sale. Cheap.

Ok, which janitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

...forgot to clean the lens properly?

Oblig. 2

[Mike O'Hara]

And I, for one, welcome our new unidentified overlords.

Oh.....

[NotFamous]

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
Better not pout,
I'm telling you why ...

Hey!

[Peet42]

Where did CERN go???

Gamma Ray Burst?

[jdagius]

Has anyone checked the gamma ray detection networks? Perhaps another "Clarke Event"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_080319B

Re:Gamma Ray Burst?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps another "Clarke Event"?

u mean kryton has exploded and hes on his way?

It's obvious, the Picard Maneuver.

[Anonymous Coward]

All our base belong to Jean Luc.

1:4:9

[baggins2001]

I did some work on it in the gimp and I think it's a dark object with the dimensions of 1:4:9. It appears to be filled with stars.

In the cosmic scheme of things

[NotQuiteReal]

I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what anything is.

Re:In the cosmic scheme of things

[Thing 1]

I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what anything is.

Exactly!

"Why is anything ANYTHING?" - the great philosopher Master Shake

I always thought it was McKay...

[hummassa]

who had the monopoly on destroying entire systems.

And now for something completly different

[timberwolf753]

Wait is this the Wolf-Biederman comet?

It's a space stargate / super game opening.

[Joe The Dragon]

It's a space stargate / super game opening.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

God! You come here right this instant!

[Murpster]

Dammit, God, stop putting your compact discs in the microwave!

They haven't ruled out a supernova

[Capt'n Hector]

It's just that if it is a SN, it's of a vastly different type than the ones we've observed before.

Seriously...

[vrmlguy]

This points out the need for a dozen simple telescopes arranged 50-light-days from Earth. The next time something like this occurs, most of them could be used to get much better parallax information.

Re:Seriously...

[FearForWings]

Seriously, 50 light-DAYS?!? A single light-day is more than 5x further out than the average orbit of Neptune, and more than 50% further than Voyager 1 has managed to get.

Perhaps you meant 50 light-minutes, or about 1 AU further out than the average orbit of Jupiter.

Re:Seriously...

[vrmlguy]

No, I was thinking expansively. ;-) The "event" played out over 100 days, so I used that as a diameter for the sphere. Still, it's a useful number. Assuming the same resolution as the current supernova survey telescopes, instruments at that distance would allow direct parallax determination for objects out to 3e6 light-years; we could then make extremely accurate measurements of the distance to anything in the Andromeda Galaxy. The downside is that moving at the speed of the Voyager craft, the observatories would take ~2,500 years to get on station. That might be a bit hard to get Congressional approval for.

A sphere of instruments 1/25th that size would allow distance measurements of everything within the Milky Way, and would take less than a century to get on station. That would probably be a more feasible timeframe, especially since useful results would begin arriving long before.

I wonder if the Long Now foundation would be interested in this?

No one

[jlechem]

else thought of Rendezvous with Rama? Or..... It's a smegging garbage pod!?!?!?!?!

Other Observatories

[John Hasler]

As it was visible for 100 days, surely other observatories looked at it. Results?

Re:Other Observatories

[amorsen]

Yes, they did. It's all in the paper. The "speck of dust" theory is wrong.

Xenu!

[voodoosoup]

Hail Xenu! He is coming!

Well, whatever it was...

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Big Yellow

[flyingfsck]

or maybe a great suffusion of yellow...

Probably not antimatter based on measured spectra

[IdahoEv]

IANAP, but my understanding is that the spectra emitted by matter/antimatter annihilation is fairly well-understood, and that most of the energy is carried in very high frequencies, like gamma rays.

Meanwhile, if you scan through the paper itself (arXiv link is downthread), they discuss spectra and absorption bands that are roughly similar to other stellar events in overall energy profile; a lot of it was in the visible spectrum.

My admittedly very poor understanding is that an M/AM event would look roughly like a gamma-ray burst, whereas this looked a lot more like a nova, albeit a very unusual one that didn't match any known profile.

The authors' best suggestion was a stellar merger event of unknown type.

Corrections from people who know astrophysics better than I would be quite appreciated...

Why is antimatter a mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the current puzzles the LHC is trying to solve is, what happened to all the antimatter?

I never understood the big mystery here.
Antimatter travels backwards through time, so it just follows a timeline symmetrical to ours. We had a little clash at the beginning of our respective times, and have now no reason to see AM again - except when high-energy events manufacture some.

Can someone point me out what's wrong with this ultrasimple explanation?

Re:Why is antimatter a mystery?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone point me out what's wrong with this ultrasimple explanation?

You mean other than the fact that antimatter does not travel backward through time?

Re:Why is antimatter a mystery?

[Kral_Blbec]

It's wrong? If antimatter traveled backwards in time then it would be present at the site of high energy events before its manufactured.... destroying what ever produced it so that it couldnt be produced in the future.

Re:Why is antimatter a mystery?

[Eudial]

Well, for one, it is completely unfalsifiable. In that sense, it's no better or worse than saying God thought it was a burrito and ate it for lunch.

Furthermore, we have no empirical evidence of particles traveling backwards in time. And nothing to indicate that. No reverse causality, or reverse entropy.

So, you are simply exchanging one unanswered question -- where is the antimatter -- for another one -- why is no antimatter created in the future?

Re:Why is antimatter a mystery?

[mstahl]

It does though, in a way. Read Richard P. Feynman's books on quantum electrodynamics and you'll see that if you run time backwards matter behaves like antimatter. That is a horrible simplification and IANAP but that was my understanding of the material. Maybe a non-armchair physicist will come along and correct me?

Quasi-space portal

[Junta]

It happens pretty regularly, go through and we should be able to ask the Arilou what the hell they have been doing to Earth all this time.

News blackout?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so an object in the sky got brighter and brighter for 100 days and there was not one news report on it? Isn't that the kind of thing you'd hope to see reported?

This does not give me much faith that they'd tell us if a giant planet killing comet were headed right for us.

Finally

[marcoj]

It's Rama!

Re: they don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the mothership coming to pick us all up.

It started making a noise too...

[Anonymous Coward]

They recorded it and played it back...

Sounds like it says "Danger Will Robinson"

Spec of dust on the lens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone get a wet wipe on a rocket ship ASAP.

Does it resemble a penis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it's an uploaded Spore creature.

Where did that come from?

[phorm]

One of the best things you can hear in scientific circles is something along the lines of "What the hell is that?"

So long as it's not followed by "ohhhhh, shit."

But as far as this object goes, is this case that it wasn't previously bright enough to see in the current location, or that it wasn't in the current location until recently? If it's the latter, how fast would it have had to move to get to where it is now, and how would that compare to the maximum velocity of other known celestial objects?

Re:Where did that come from?

[amorsen]

that it wasn't in the current location until recently?

No movement was detected. Red shift is unknown, since the spectrum doesn't match anything. It isn't a star which decided to teleport.

Carter vs. McKay

[Anonymous Coward]

Sam *intentionally* blew up a star. Meredith only *accidentally* blew up a system.

Yeah, that's two points for Carter.

Re:Carter vs. McKay

[Ded Bob]

Hopefully, she can find Sanctuary somewhere.

Re:Carter vs. McKay

[Barryke]

Sarcasm rules!

What could it be?

[32771]

They could just call it a large scale industrial accident, or target practice with a death star out in an intergalactic/interstellar proving ground whatever the distance ends up being.

I know what that is.

[blair1q]

It's a Higgs Boson.

The folks at CERN are gonna be pissed after they spent all that time building the LHC and we just find one lying around...

Re:I know what that is.

[Nembi]

If it's that big, wait till they get the cleaning bill after they find one in the LHC. That will tick them right off!

LHC nope...Cylon's....nope...Borg...nope...it's

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Neil Armstrong's golf ball...beat that Tiger...

Re:LHC nope...Cylon's....nope...Borg...nope...it's

[Rick Genter]

That was Alan Shepard's golf ball. Apollo 14.

Unidentified... and unidentifiable

[ivoras]

So we have a speck of light somewhere between "130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away". It would be exciting if we got a FTL drive so someone can hop over there and take a look - unfortunately all it will remain now is a blip in a picture :(

What they saw

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is an image of what they saw. (possibly NSFW)

Re:How long until the creationists come out to pla

[Dog-Cow]

On the other hand, your post clearly shows that you are a raving moron.

Not the Borg, but let's hope it's not...

[Nick Driver]

...something like the aliens in this sci-fi story whose ship radiates enough x-rays from its engines, while underway at cruising speed, to fry every biological molecule on Earth into constituent atoms. And the aliens are coming here to steal the entire planet of Jupiter for its massive hydrogen content, to use as fuel for their ship while they target the next Jupiter-like gas giant to do the same as they criss-cross the universe like nomadic space pirates.

Extreme example of a gravitational lens?

[phorest]

Don't laugh... OK, so I don't remember a lot of space physics from 35 years ago (been that long too) and I am not a star watcher either, but I do seem to remember something about gravitational lenses and the bending/focusing of light from large bodies in space and astronomers having to make adjustments accordingly.

What if there is another type that we haven't considered that will focus another object into a place that can only be observed under very special circumstances? Just a thought, I'll let you space-geeks argue now.

Re:Extreme example of a gravitational lens?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The paper already discusses why a microlensing event (that's the name for what you describe) is an unlikely explanation. (You should probably pat yourself on the back for a good try though.)

LHC

[burnclouds]

I know the world would end... all you dooms day nay sayers!

or it could be the "evil" from the Fifth Element. Yay! Mila Jovovich!

lol - the Hubble found God

[Orig_Club_Soda]

Now what will the haters say?

The paper

[gcranston]

Here's a link to another, slightly more serious article, which also links the paper itself.

Re:The paper

[Legion303]

Thank you. Gizmodo is a heap of shit and reading that article (which didn't bother referencing the title of the paper or any of the authors, or linking to anything else but other Gizmodo fluff pieces) made me cry.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[AKAImBatman]

I'm shocked that it took this many posts for a reasonable response to pop up. Yowza. Slashdot is losing its touch.

Meanwhile, if you scan through the paper itself (arXiv link is downthread), they discuss spectra and absorption bands that are roughly similar to other stellar events in overall energy profile; a lot of it was in the visible spectrum.

You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.

My next best guess would be a failed star birth. If there was enough hydrogen collecting to ignite, but nothing that lit it from where we could see, the star would appear to simply come into existence. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions about how a star could ignite without sufficient fuel to sustain it. Unless the trigger was some other event. e.g. If we poured enough energy into Jupiter (say, terrawatt lasers), would it be possible to briefly ignite the gas giant?

Hmm... it's tough to come up with ideas without venturing out into the land of "maybes". Which is all idle speculation unless one is willing to test the theory in some manner. (Either crunch the numbers or run an experiment to determine the viability of such concepts.)

Perhaps it was...

[uberjack]

Lrrr's spaceship?

Here's a picture

[blackmonday]

My buddy from JPL forwarded me the first picture of the object. Click here to see it..

Dark Matter Objects

[Quantus347]

Perhaps its a bright object that is moving behind some large, previously unknown Dark Matter objects floating out there between galaxies. They say there is more of the Dark side than Light out there (Insert Star Wars pun here).

IT'S DUKE NUKEM FOREVER!

[Coolhand2120]

At long last the game has been released, but due to a mix-up in the marketing department it was accidentally released in the wrong galaxy.

I know what it is...

[ianalis]

It's Russel's teapot.

Coincidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame that Hadron collider.

An Alien LHC

[Akita24]

See what happened when they tested theirs at full power!

Reference ?

[freddy_dreddy]

Could someone help me find the alleged source of this news, I can't seem to find it on nasa and google just spits up gizmodo copies.
Thanks

What they've really discovered is more funding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else find it 'convenient' that they discover 'something' right around the time of their 'final' service? /tinfoil hat

It's the Mandelbrot Set

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else here think it looks like the Mandelbrot Set??

Alien Particle Collider ?

[truckaxle]

Yet another highly evolved species endowed with an equally highly curious nature fires up a most ambitious particle collider.

Wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the coming of Lord Desslok of the Gamilons!

is this observation confirmed ?

[freddy_dreddy]

All I can find are endless copies of /. and gizmodo. My question: doesn't this Hubble observation require confirmation from a second source? This is nothing like what it should be and ocam's razor is still the best choice.

My guess (from what little I've found to read): the unidentified phenomenon is inside Hubble - hardware/software.

Upon closer inspection

[mr_lizard13]

it turned out to be a CD-ROM of Duke Nukem Forever

There you are...

[Anonymous Coward]

You always had a flair for the theatrical, Steve Foster.

Welcome to the new age for mankind

[Anonymous Coward]

We have just witness for the first time a wormhole in action.

First contact is coming.

4th dimension?

[�berhund]

The book Flatland encourages you to imagine the 4th dimension by first imagining how a 2-dimensional being would perceive a 3-dimensional object. It could seemingly appear out of nowhere, and disappear again.

Space moth?

[macdaddy]

Like bugs to a bug zapper.... Zero-G moths!

obligatory!

[DragonTHC]

"That's no moon, it's a space station"

Unidentified Objects In Space?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are unidentified objects in space? Holy rubber ducky shit, Batman!

Centre of the Galaxy

[margretli]

That has got to be the centre of the Galaxy as Will Wright puts it. I've been looking for that damn thing last night...

Re:How long until the creationists come out to pla

[Jason Levine]

Exactly how? Perhaps I didn't word my sarcasm correctly. Looking at my "Troll" moderation and your response, perhaps I gave the view that I myself am a Creationist. I thought my "Jebus" ending would be a dead giveaway, but I've been less than clear at times when attempting humor. Let me be clear, then. I am not a Creationist. I take the scientific view of things and demand proof and falsification for my theories about how the Universe came into being. I see science finding things that it can't explain as a good thing overall. It forces us to update our theories to account for those anomalies, perhaps even ditching flawed theories entirely. Creationists, on the other hand, never change their theory (why should they when "God did it" can't be falsified?) and seem to think that any reworking of a theory just proves that the theory is bad.

What is that thing?

[kevinwal]

That's Obama's campaign strategy imploding.

it's obvious.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's God. And he's waiting for a starship.

Nothing to worry about....

[g00d_4sh]

Nothing to worry about... it's just the return of the Great Old Ones. ;) "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."

The more we learn...

[HikingStick]

The more we learn, the less we know.

Another LHC in a galaxy far far away

[CottonThePirate]

billions of years ago "scientists" turned on a LHC searching for darkmatter. It's a warning to us all! (kidding)

Voyager1 just crashed in to a spacecraft...

[Anonymous Coward]

powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive.

goatse'd!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah! Hubble's been goatse'd!

Event Horizon

[[000000]]

I finks it was an experiment like 'event horizon'

Lucky for us, they're decommissioning Hubble

[Anonymous Coward]

No sense in seeing new things for too long. Might give all those monkeys bad ideas.

Well...

[kaosfury]

I for one would like to welcome our new alien overlords...

MIB obligatory

[Tablizer]

Pffft. It's just Venus shine reflecting off of swamp gas and then bouncing off of a weather balloon.

Re:BADsciencejokes.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't we just rename slashdot.org to BADsciencejokes.org???

It's a dyson beacon

[0xABADC0DA]

How insightful can a comment be when even the NASA astronomers don't know what it is? It's a post of ignorance, i.e. there's nothing more to be said unless someone has more data.

When the experts have no clue that's when they need a shot of imagination from some laymen -- enough crazy hairbrained ideas and something might stick.

Personally, I think it's a dyson sphere composed of satellites that is set to 'shutter' over a long period (by rotating flat sattelites to allow light to pass). It's probably counting primes from 1 to 101 over the course of a few years by blinking on/off.

Think about it, if you want to get the attention of very distant aliens you need massive power of a sun, and you need a signal that changes gradually so that aliens studying that particular star see the change if actively studying it, or that see the change over a long time when doing sweeps of the area (present in this image, but not in the images a year later, etc). Tweak the spectrum using the material of your dyson sphere itself to add interest by making it not look like anything else.

Re:It's a dyson beacon

[Anonymous Coward]

"infrared heavy" fits the bill. It's exactly what you would hope to see. We knew if we looked around long enough we would find one. Here it is people. Oh... and it's OLD.. really old.

A dyson Sphere is the ultimate result of any technology. Both Micro, and Macro.
What to do with it once you have built it though? Hmmmm?

Black dwarf?

[Kenrod]

Could it be a black dwarf star in our own galaxy that was illuminated by the light of a past supernova? That could account for the relatively short time the object was illuminated.

The object is

[Anonymous Coward]

a large black obelisk with eerie choir singing and a bunch of apes.

Spoiler Alert!

[Tax Boy]

Voco Fraa Erasmus!

My guess

[Burz]

I am guessing that it is a new type of 'nova' produced by a stellar collision. Perhaps a white dwarf tearing open a faint main-sequence star (or a gas giant) like a bursting soap bubble.

The failed starbirth idea is interesting too. What if a very large 'planet' with a lot of heavy elements reached some sort of critical mass and began to fuse for a short time before running out of fuel?

i want to believe

[GregNorc]

Have we ruled out aliens?

I'm being serious... something was not there, then suddenly appeared. Obviously it's a very unlikely possibility, one that may never be able to be disproved (and thus a theory to be taken with a grain of salt) but I have to admit that the first thought I had when they said the object "mysteriously appeared" was like in the preview I saw for The Day the Earth Stood Still... scientists spot an object assumed to be a meteor, but decide it will miss earth. Then they notice it's changing it's course...

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[Attila the Bun]

My admittedly very poor understanding is that an M/AM event would look roughly like a gamma-ray burst, whereas this looked a lot more like a nova, albeit a very unusual one that didn't match any known profile.

Be very careful. If your post should collide with any other post in this thread, it's liable to annihilate in a shower of gamma rays.

I don't know.

[pavon]

It wasn't my turn to watch them!

Whew...

[Belegothmog]

the fifth element has saved us once again from the forces of evil and darkness.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[dlevitan]

You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.

This is actually not accurate. The article contains a spectrograph from 4000 to 10000 angstroms. It does not contain any shorter wavelengths. The way you find an object's redshift is by matching known absorption/emission lines with the object's emission lines. The offset is the redshift. As the article points out, there's no obvious match to the few narrow lines, thus, we don't know what the redshift is. For some reason (possibly because the object was too faint), they did not observe in the UV or X-ray ranges, which would've been helpful for higher energy events, especially if it was galactic.

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[account_deleted]

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Duh...

[munineye]

It's a TARDIS! What else comes out of nowhere?

Whatever is, its old news...

[dilvish_the_damned]

Being 8.4 billion light years away...

it's probably just god....

[SirLars]

... lighting another one of his farts.

Obligatory

[linhares]

Pentium bug.

I can't believe nobody yet recognized it

[markov_chain]

Two words: crystalline entity!

Anyone got a penny?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we've found the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (possibly under construction).

oh jaunita

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a snail
i call your name
etc

they found Waldo

[Anonymous Coward]

they found Waldo, but still don't know how far away it is.

Have you ever read Flashforward?

[juancn]

The gist of the plot is that a strange interstellar event happens at the same time they start the LHC, with some interesting consecuences. The timing gives me the creeps ;)
See Flashforward

Re:Have you ever read Flashforward?

[MartinSchou]

at the same time they start the LHC

Well, sure ... if we ignore that the object seems to be between 130 and 11 billion light years away. In other words, you might as well find it disturbing that a strang interstellar even happens at the same time that Palin was announced as a Vice Presidential Candidate (in a 47,481 day period that's less than 1 percent off). Hrmm ... she's a massively religious nutter, isn't she? Quick, someone tell her that this is the new star of Bethlehem!

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I call it a Fry-hole!

Interstellar ship decellerating

[theolein]

If there was any error in the measure of distance and the event happens again the next few months, then my money is on an interstellar ship decelerating from near light speed.

Re:Interstellar ship decellerating

[Barryke]

I'd say a collision of some sorts, where some matter is stopped in its tracks and obliterated by the energy.

Piled Higher n' Deeper

[cyberseptic]

"In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is."

Yep. Pretty much sounds like science to me.
Signed, A Scientist

Unfunny yet lovable news!

[Barryke]

Being the most "unfunny" thing i ever read, i still cant help loving it.

How weird can it get.. In any other case, it'd be bad news.

Greenfly

[orkysoft]

Don't worry, it's here to help. Whether you want it to or not.

Excuse me? This happened in 2006??!

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]On February 21, 2006, in the direction of a far-away cluster in Bootes named CL 1432.5+3332.8 (redshift 1.112, light travel time 8.2 billion years), Hubble began seeing something brighten.
[/quote]

This was over 2 years ago and nobody has any ideas huh?

Bugger!

H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond the Wall of Sleep

[Weaselmancer]

The object is the Nemesis doing battle with the Oppressor from Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye.

FTL wave artifact entering normal space.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be here by 2012!

A party?

[MarcoSgnaolin]

They're celebrating something in heaven with fireworks.

Dyson Spheres R Us

[GREY_LENSMAN312]

obviously, some entity built a Dyson sphere kit. It took a hundred days and then it was sealed up.

It's Praxis

[Rick Genter]

There's been an "incident."

Lets take off and nuke it from orbit...

[jamesh]

... it's the only way to be sure.

This just in: a possible explaination

[Anonymous Coward]

arXiv:0809.2562
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:22:25 GMT (44kb)

Title: SCP06F6: A carbon-rich extragalactic transient at redshift z~0.14
Authors: B.T. Gaensicke, A.J. Levan, T.R. Marsh, P.J. Wheatley
Categories: astro-ph
Comments: submitted to ApJ Letters
\\
    We show that the spectrum of the unusual transient SCP06F6 is consistent with
emission from a cool, carbon-rich atmosphere at a redshift of z~0.14. The
extragalactic nature of the transient rules out novae, shell flashes, and V838
Mon-like events as cause of the observed brightening. The distance to SCP 06F6
implies a peak magnitude of M_I~-18, in the regime of supernovae. The
morphology of the light curve of SCP 06F6 around the peak in brightness
resembles the slowly evolving TypeII supernovae SN 1994Y and SN 2006 gy. We
further report the detection of an X-ray source co-incident with SCP 06F6 in a
target of opportunity XMM-Newton observation made during the declining phase of
the transient. The X-ray luminosity of L_X~(5+-1)x10^42 erg/s is two orders of
magnitude higher than observed to date from supernovae. If related to a
supernova event, SCP 06F6 would define a new class. An alternative, though less
likely, scenario is the tidal disruption of a carbon-rich star.

Isn't it obvious?

[Trogre]

Grit.

Dyson Sphere?

[ArmchairGeneral]

Maybe the civilization was doing some maintenance work on their Dyson Sphere.

Occam's Razor

[Aphoxema]

It may best be assumed that the simplest explanation is the best explanation.

This is probably just a cosmic rift of some sorts involving civilizations far off and more intelligent than our own engaged in an intergalactic war involving weapons we haven't even yet speculated, the results of which will be felt by Earth in about 823 years where we're met by an event involving cake or death by the Splerghlaridish Inquisition, whom none have expected, and will enslave humanity because the shape of our hands are the one race they have yet found that is excellent at wielding sock puppets, leaving humanity to suffer the role of puppeteers forced to perform for millions of strange species who think we taste really bad and smell really good. Not long after that, Luke will blow up the death star and the Super Gigantic Hadron Collider will finally find the Higg's Boson leaving us with a weapon of incredible power that will allow us to make our prior rulers the new puppeteers but also our marionettes. Then the universe will suddenly implode starting the next big bang. What's after that, even I can't ramble on about incoherently for no reason other than I have nothing better to do before I go to bed.

I hope that helps NASA in their endeavor for world conquest.

Rama???

[Anonymous Coward]

It's you?

Hmm, sounds like a Futurama episode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you referring to this?

Obviously....

[superdave51]

OMG!! It is the Galactic Federation of Light. They are due to make an appearance on Earth on October 14!

mmph..

[houbou]

I thought for a moment that this UFO might be related to Vin Diesel's acting ability. Hearing about it alot, but can't really see it. :)

could be an object from another dimension

[savage_panda]

reminds me of the thought experiment that a sphere passing through a 2d plane would appear to the 2d residents as an expanding than fading circle. what if this is something similar. an energetic 4D object that crosses our 3D plane. The EM-waves emitted by the phenomenon should also be moving through. We could detect if particles dissapear by bouncing it around in a containment field.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm shocked that it took this many posts for a reasonable response to pop up. Yowza. Slashdot is losing its touch.

You must not be new here.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[julesh]

If we poured enough energy into Jupiter (say, terrawatt lasers),

I don't suspect terawatts would achieve an awful lot. Hold on:

Surface area: 6e10 km^2 = 6e16 m^2

Applying Stefan-Boltzmann law:

P / 6e16 = 6e-8 T^4

(where T is the temperature difference that will cause that much additional power to be radiated by a black body of Jupiter's size)

rearranging for T:

T = (P / 3.6e8) ^ 1/4

So, say we can put in 100TW (=1e14 W), we'll see a rise in temperature on Jupiter's surface of about 13 Kelvin.

I doubt that'd achieve an awful lot. :)

Monolith ignition

[hman]

Slashdot is really going downhill these days.
Here is a poster speculation about a failed star, "but what could ignite it" ???
Monolith of course. Just ask Arthur C. Clarke about it, standard reference works provide good enough documentation.

It the light from Britney's bald head....

[Anonymous Coward]

...Which was reflected into space and has obviously bounced back off something else and is now visible by Hubble - hence the reason it spontaneosly appeared out of no where and the time delay.

I think it was reflected off all the WMODs that IRAQ have been storing "somewhere"...

Its a Dyson sphere

[Anonymous Coward]

... with hyper drive.

No Way, Dude...antimatter went the other way.

[caliburngreywolf]

In a flash of (non pot inspired)insight, I began to wonder...why would antimatter go "forward" in time? Why wouldn't it behave exactly the opposite and go "backward" in time. That sure would explain its absence in our spacetime. Then I googled it and found it was proposed by the Feynman-Stueckelberg Interpretation. Ah well. It was too obvious to be an original thought.

Alf is coming back!

[alukin]

Alf is coming back! Best friend of your cat on TV in new season! :)

Hubble Telescope moving into position

[Anonymous Coward]

ITS A TRAP!

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[bytesex]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Jupiter (and Saturn) weren't completely 'black' bodies; namely that they radiated in the infrared spectrum ?

Obligatory LHC joke

[Anonymous Coward]

The Superlarge Alien Hadron Collider just performed its first experiments.

Anon

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Michael Jackson. First it was black, now all there's left is white.

Check the lens

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they need a wipe?

what about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Measurement artifact anyone?

Unknown Object

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this be the Grox?

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[stranger here myself]

You are right: in particular, electron + positron normally annihilate to produce 2 511 keV gammas, which is a very distinctive signature indeed. So if this was a large M/AM event not only would NASA know what it was, but they'd be able to use the red shift to locate it somewhat better than "outside our galaxy but within the visible universe".

The absence of this signature generally (except near highly energetic phenomena which are themselves capable of producing antimatter) is a major reason we believe that the universe is composed entirely of matter, as opposed to having matter-dominated and antimatter-dominated regions, e.g. AM galaxies would be identifiable from the gammas produced when their interstellar (anti)gas met the intergalactic medium.

Just as Nostradamus predicts

[glowworm]

Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
Raypoz will exterminate all who oppose him,(?)
Before the coming the sky will show signs.

pray to save us from spaghettification!

[wikinerd]

My dear friends, this unidentified object in the sky is nothing more and nothing less than the intergalactic equivalent of Slashdot, built by the alien nerds for their own amusement in the highest moment of their career in nerdiness. It is designed to affect all space-observing civilisations by a strong wow signal which is a million times stronger than the extreme physiological, psychological, gravitational, and hyper-newage-quantum ufo-bogodynamical effects an earthian sysop feels when they see the incredible Slashdot effect on their (liquidated) server, causing their alter ego to wake up and take revenge, before understanding that resistance is futile and therefore attempting a career change as a pirate. This intergalactic Slashdot and its big flash, my dear nerds, is the last thing civilisations below 1 in the Kardashev scale manage to see before being wiped out by the intergalactic Slashdot effect that makes our 'mputers go mad and engulfs our planet in a big cosmic hyper hurricane before spaghettificating and totally annihilating us. That is, folks, we are goint to become interplanetary spaghetti, unless we keep our faith strong and pray to the great flying spaghetti monster to save us from spaghettification! (oh, and chanting the monster's name thrice will enable you to see that all the universe started out of Eden, not far from Kansas).

It's a...

[Duranium256]

Ringworld?

Outside context problem

[Auldclootie]

This was fairly obviously an outside-context-problem. The light show was probably a Culture General Contact Unit (GCU) with 250,000,000 fun-loving souls aboard, skidding to a stop alongside the OCP and temporarily disrupting the energy flow in the grid... NO? Ok so prove me wrong...

It's a stoplight

[skabob]

I'm pretty sure it's a stoplight. /a little fark crossover

It might help:

[Lost Penguin]

If only there was a short acronym to describe strange flying objects like this.

Aha...

[Bongo]

  my car keys.

Re:How long until the creationists come out to pla

[IWannaBeAnAC]

I'm sorry you got modded a troll, I for one thought it was funny. And yes, that is exactly what a creationist would claim.

I expect you pissed off the creationists by the references to Jebus and the hovering rigatoni creature. According to surveys, this encompassas at least 50% of the american population, so presumably also many slashdot moderators.

It's...

[Promodeus]

42.

Most likely causes

[TMB]

Interesting... so their best matches to the spectrum are DQp WD (a type of very magnetic white dwarf) or a BALQSO (quasar with broad absorption lines from surrounding gas). While the light curve kind of looks like gravitational microlensing, it changes colour which microlensing events normally don't(*) - although they could if the object that's being lensed is resolved. So the best option would have appeared to be a somewhat nearby lensed BAL QSO - except that in that case it would definitely have been seen in the reference images. So the best option is a DQp that either had some sort of surface event that brightened it by at least two orders of magnitude (probably the most likely option) or got lensed while undergoing minor colour changes.

(*) The timescale also seems to make the lensing option unlikely, but not impossible if the relative speeds of the source and lens happen to be very low.

Guys... I figured it out.

[Hierophant7]

I did some spectral analysis and some sharpening of the hubble images to come up with what I think is the answer. http://www.flickr.com/photos/30555845@N04/2862895792/

who know's...

[ZonkerWilliam]

It could be a drive flare from a Photon/fusion/antimatter (pick one) drive that's happened to point exactly our way for those few days.

Two possibilities

[whitroth]

a) there goes Krypton, or
b) the Galactic Patrol vs. the Boskonians

          mark

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[mmwithpeanuts]

I don't think a stellar merger would disappear, as this did, unless there was a certain annihilation caused by more than a merger, as in a crash.

Interstellar dust clumps

[mmwithpeanuts]

This is in a very unknown area of our universe. When interstellar dust clouds clump together, sometimes they form stars; sometimes they just die out before a star can be formed, due to the lack of certain ingredients, or because not enough matter is available. This one turned out to be an interstellar dust bunny that just hopped away back into a hole, where it died. In other words, it was a still birth at best with an observed partial gestation of 100 days, Earth time. This thing was probably billions of light years away.

Great Scott!

[Stanistani]

The future is what we make it. Isn't that the point of scifi?

Well, it was the point of the Back to the Future movies:

Jennifer: Dr. Brown, I brought this note back from the future and now it's erased!
Doc Brown: Of course it's erased!
Jennifer: But what does that mean?
Doc Brown: It means your future hasn't been written yet. No one's has. Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one, both of you!
Marty: We will, Doc.

Such fun, such joy, such nonsense

[Nobby21]

Its nothing like a restaurant I hope....or do I?

Teens playing Chicken in Space

[TimSSG]

I say an couple of teenage-like aliens playing chicken; and, neither one dodged. Two spaceships going close to light speed hitting each other would release a lot of energy in an short time span. Tim S

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[julesh]

That's what we call a simplifying assumption. It's probably correct to within an order of magnitude, which translates to about 2-3 Kelvin in the final answer.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[Starlet Monroe]

IANAAP, but I am a regular physicist, just a rusty and not very good one right now.

And I get that this is functionally a dead thread since it's two days old, but here's hoping...

Do we have a package coded anywhere that compares a set of spectral lines against all of our known spectra, _including_ our known spectra red/blueshifted beyond the typical expected astronomical speeds for galaxies and such? IE, what if we get a collision or something between two chunks or clouds of matter moving at .5c, or something similar.

If it's not written now, can we write it?

Eclipse...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like maybe a mass/mater eclipse on a galactic scale?

Eclipse

[OldHawk777]

I vote for mass/mater eclipse on a galactic scale?

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[dlevitan]

IAAAP (actually a grad student). I'm actually not sure if there is such a package, but basically all this stuff is done by grad students and its fairly routine nowadays for uncomplicated objects. For anything complicated, a computer program wouldn't be able to do a think for you.

Re:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect

[Starlet Monroe]

But why not?

I mean that in the, "what is there to overcome" sense. I just wonder if something in a neighboring field might help handle the data in a different way that happens to be helpful. Am I wrong in thinking that it's just a bunch of spectral lines that we get out, which oughta be parseable somehow?

I'm just starting my grad work, but I got back into the physics side of things by doing data analysis automation for my department, so I'm just trying to see if there's some way I can be, you know, helpy.