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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."
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.
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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."
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.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Can't get much funnier than getting your astronomy news from a gadget site.
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.
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
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
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.
Comment of the year
Huh?? Why in Zeus' name would you start out from that assumption when there's no evidence for it at all?
"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..."."
You mean other than the fact that antimatter does not travel backward through time?
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!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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?
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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!