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."
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
That's no moon!
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.
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it's another Alien civilization that just annihilated itself in nuclear\fusion\antimatter\something hellfire?
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
Correction, its an alien civilization that just did their first experiment on the LHC.
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...
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:4, Funny)
The shadowy figure waves back at you!
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Especially their enormous fleet.
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:4, Funny)
It was Sam. (Score:3, Funny)
It was Major Carter, exploding another star.
Once you blow up one star, they expect everything from you.
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
my money would be on a Vogon Construction crew
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Funny)
I foresee a slight problem with developing a hand-grenade that has a 2km blast radius...
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hubble Windex: For that Deep [Space] Shine! (Score:4, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Funny)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly! NASA obviously needs to do a better job of keeping the lense clean. :-P
Those darn Water Bears [slashdot.org] are already causing havoc.
Probably not antimatter based on measured spectra (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
This is what happens when God plays with lighters after eating mexican food.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't you get the memo [xkcd.com]? A meme that is 20+ years old is an old meme. A tired meme. A meme that needs to rest in peace.
That's no moon. It's a space station. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's no moon. It's a space station. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's no moon. It's a space station. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
*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. (Score:4, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's no moon. It's a space station. (Score:4, Funny)
That's no Space Station, that's an LHC (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Large Hadrosaur Collider?
I'm betting (Score:5, Funny)
... it's a Bowl of Petunias, or a sperm whale (again).
Re:I'm betting (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, Agrajag is going to be even more touchy now.
All thermal sensors are jammed. (Score:5, Funny)
One shows a million degrees. The others, minus five thousand.
Aliens must own stock too. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
> My 10 year old photocopier can do that.
Your 10 year old photocopier can reproduce, so you don't have to.
Ominous! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ominous! (Score:4, Funny)
Regards
GSV Steely Glint
(cc Fates amenable to change, Ethics Gradient)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
X ROU Killing Time
O Steely Glint
On my way ...
I think we should dispatch the nearest LSU
My keys? (Score:3, Funny)
Did I leave my keys out in space again? I keep doing that. Sorry.
The 5th element (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I know what it is... (Score:5, Funny)
...that dam' kid down the block with his laser pointer again!
Obvious answer (Score:5, Funny)
It's a gigantic sphere of single socks, nonworking ball point pens, car keys, reading glasses, coffee mugs....
Well, they have to go somewhere....
His noodly appendages (Score:4, Funny)
it must be the flying spaghetti monster!
Probably. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's a rock.
Re:Probably. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Borg! (Score:5, Funny)
It's the Borg! I'm selling my Lehman stock now!
please stop with the inane star wars jokes (Score:5, Funny)
what is wrong with you people?
we all know deep in our hearts it is the decepticons
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.
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
hahahahaa!!... Oh wait, you were serious...
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't get much funnier than getting your astronomy news from a gadget site.
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot is no place for manual-reading freaks like you!
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Please tell me more about these space crickets when you get a chance.
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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 (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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Tm
Re:Modding system (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
after work?
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.
Scooped! (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Race to theorize (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Loop (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Sky and Telescope Article (Score:5, Informative)
The Sky and Telescope article [skyandtelescope.com] is much better than the Gizmodo blog [gizmodo.com]. The article explains why it can't be closer than 130 ly due to no parallax [wikipedia.org], 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 [arxiv.org]. I suggest you read that article instead. It is much more interesting!
battlestar? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm just going to go ahead and assume it's a Cylon base ship jumping around.
Uh Oh... (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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.
Re:Serious guess (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I bet... (Score:5, Funny)
... its dimensions are 1 by 4 by 9
Well, Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, Good (Score:5, Insightful)
"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..."."
Gamma rays and other frequencies (Score:5, Informative)
Did we observe anything with our other space telescopes? Gamma ray burst?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst_progenitors [wikipedia.org]
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Any connection to the "oh-my-god" particle? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_Particle [wikipedia.org]
Hey! (Score:5, Funny)
Where did CERN go???
Quasi-space portal (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Mike broke the Hubble! Mike broke the Hubble!
Re:they found God ? (Score:5, Funny)
When god is a bit more impressive than 21st magnitude, let me know.
Re:fly on the lens? (Score:4, Funny)
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:Logical conclusion (Score:5, Informative)
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 [arxiv.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this for real??? (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf [arxiv.org]
Re:Won't be too long before we are all (Score:4, Funny)
you mean the ones that blew themselves up?
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.
Re:Extreme example of a gravitational lens? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LHC nope...Cylon's....nope...Borg...nope...it's (Score:4, Funny)
That was Alan Shepard's golf ball. Apollo 14 [wikipedia.org].