It Is What It Was
Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space,
Scientists Puzzled
This is exactly why we send astronauts to risk their life to service Hubble: in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when a research paper conclusion says "We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class" I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Especially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tinfoil hats out, because it gets even weirder.
posted by Indigobusiness @ Thursday, September 18, 2008
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Oh Indi - did you happen to read the comments?!!!
These guys are too much:
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"We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class."
Its the next generation IPhone! From heaven to us, the long way. (That Steve Jobs is a marketing genius.)
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Question regarding this statement -
"Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away."
I noticed that some of the commenters are saying "It's old news" -- I've never understood the "light years away" thing.....
Do you have any good links that might explain
this? Do you know what I'm trying to ask here? I don't even know how to frame the question properly......
Hi again Indi
(off topic)
RE: your "Do you dream about the future" post a few down.
Have you ever read this -
Handbook for the New Paradigm - Volume One
One of our bloggers at blondesense just sent it to me. Looks interesting.
Hey JC, The problem with light-years is this sort of scale is beyond comprehension on a human level. There are no meaningful ratios to afford real rational comprehension.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, @5.8 trillion miles, but the comment about pinning it down is interesting.
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No idea, but distance wrong
Posted by Dr. Gottfried Beyvers September 12, 2008 At 08:57 AM PDT
I don't know what that object might be, but I do know that you gave the wrong distance of the cluster CL 1432.5+3332.8 ! Its redshift is 1.112; the cosmology calculators then tell us that its proper distance is now 11.7 billion lightyears and that the distance at emission was 5.54 billion lightyears. The number you report (8.2 billion) is the light travel TIME! S&T has had a good record of giving correct cosmological distances, please do continue that. Light travel time multiplied by the speed of light is NO useful distance parameter.Thank you! I've edited the text to clarify that the "distance" is given as the light travel time. This is widely used, actually, since this version of cosmological "distance" says the most useful things about what we are actually viewing -- not what we _would_ see if we had a God's-eye view and could see "now" at infinite speed, Einstein be damned. Nor what we would see if we traveled back in time and looked at infinite speed from then. Anyway, thanks for the clarification. Alan MacRobert
ok I feel a little better that I'm not the only one who can't wrap her head around this.
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