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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."
That's no moon!
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.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
... it's a Bowl of Petunias, or a sperm whale (again).
One shows a million degrees. The others, minus five thousand.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
For those of you who have seen the movie the fifth element be scared, be very scared.
...that dam' kid down the block with his laser pointer again!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Mike broke the Hubble! Mike broke the Hubble!
It's a gigantic sphere of single socks, nonworking ball point pens, car keys, reading glasses, coffee mugs....
Well, they have to go somewhere....
it must be the flying spaghetti monster!
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's a rock.
When god is a bit more impressive than 21st magnitude, let me know.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's the Borg! I'm selling my Lehman stock now!
what is wrong with you people?
we all know deep in our hearts it is the decepticons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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!"
It's the Universe's backup of itself. It would store it offsite, but it's kinda hard when everywhere is here.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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!"
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
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
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!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
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.
... its dimensions are 1 by 4 by 9
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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?"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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.
Here you go: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf
Where did CERN go???
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.
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...
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm shocked that it took this many posts for a reasonable response to pop up. Yowza. Slashdot is losing its touch.
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.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.