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NASA's Fermi Satellite Maps Entire Sky, Finds Mysterious Unknown Object
StartsWithABang writes: With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe — gamma rays — all over the sky, to unprecedented precision. Produced from cosmic ray showers in space when high energy protons run into other, stationary protons, these gamma rays locate point sources from supermassive black holes to supernova remnants to pulsars. There is, additionally, a great correlation between the infrared sky and the gamma ray sky, since the great high-energy background scatters off of the diffuse infrared gas, producing gamma rays there as well. But while a great many sources can be correlated with known structures, Fermi reveals at least one unknown, intense behemoth that emits spectacularly in gamma rays.
Um. Does anyone have a non-forbes link?
Slashdot should not be accepting stories with links that refuse to work with AdBlock enabled.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Hehehe....NoScript showed a black page, it caused my browser to load nothing. Then I checked the url, Forbes. End-O-Session, nope, do not want, the Forbes site is the Breath of Satan.
The aliens have their drive unit pointed at us as they want to decelerate into our solar system and not fly right through it. Their drive emissions are tremendously blue shifted (into the gamma rays) since they are approaching at a fair percentage of the speed of light (and maybe the drive is outputting gamma rays to begin with).
The best way to verify this would be to look at the spectra of the gamma ray emissions and see if they are gradually being redshifted (slowing down). This would give us an idea of how fast they are decelerating and maybe when they will be arriving. Let's hope that their ship isn't really huge or that it's not pointed directly at us so that their drive won't scour away our atmosphere!
(They could also be using a huge solar sail and what we're seeing is the reflection of our own sun but they'd really have to be moving very very close to c in order for it to be reflected as gamma rays. In that case, since they would be traveling just behind the wavefront they would also have to be right on top of us!).