Hubble Finds Unidentified Object In Space 716
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."
Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Modding system (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A Matrioshka Brain decloaking (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Serious guess (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Well, Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Any connection to the "oh-my-god" particle? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_Particle [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sky and Telescope Article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's been there all along. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
News blackout? (Score:1, Interesting)
This does not give me much faith that they'd tell us if a giant planet killing comet were headed right for us.
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Extreme example of a gravitational lens? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Probably not antimatter based on measured spect (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Modding system (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It's a dyson beacon (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Have you ever read Flashforward? (Score:3, Interesting)
See Flashforward [wikipedia.org]
Re:Modding system (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org], three years after that to find the second [starrymirror.com] and one year after that to find the third [uni-heidelberg.de] (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.