It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
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
------------------------------------------------------------
Mystery Object
Posted by Tom Buchanan September 12, 2008 At 02:09 PM PDT
I read the paper and examined the spectrum. Five absorption lines were found, two of which were tentatively identified as hydrogen and one as sodium. The two remaining mystery lines are at 5360 and 6330 angstroms. I suggest that the 6330 line is Fe X, which shows up in the flash spectrum of a total solar eclipse at 6374 angstroms. The value 6374 appears to fit the trough in the spectrum better than the 6330 value marked on the chart. Perhaps the 5360 result is caused by some other ionized atoms. I examined all flash spectra I have, including three I took, and those published in S & T (October 1973, p. 221; and August 1970, p. 79). I could find no trace of any unusual line at 5360. The apparent absence of the hydrogen-alpha line might be because the absorption cancels out the emission, especially in a spectrum of low resolution. This situation occurs in some stars.
-------------------------------------------------------------
My Guess
Posted by Alan C September 15, 2008 At 02:12 AM PDT
The light curve strongly suggests gravitational lensing, while the broad absorption bands suggest a rapidly rotating cloud of gas. Perhaps there is a black hole or other dense object which lenses the light from a star or galaxy, and this has an accretion disk of gas and dust which produces the absorption bands. I don't know if this model can be made to fit all of the more subtle features of the observations but I think it might explain the gross features. If this is correct then it is not actually a new class of object at all.
Originally posted by network dude
As a matter of National Security, this thread must be shut down and all who read it will be shot, questioned, then released. Nothing to see here, move along.
Originally posted by Lebowski achiever
What I don't understand (and maybe I am completely ignorant) but doesn't the Hubble Telescope produce amazing pictures? Like the Eagle Nebula. But this one is grainy and not very clear. Why?
Originally posted by Lebowski achiever
reply to post by TheAgentNineteen
I see.. Thanks for clarifying!
Originally posted by Fromabove
Maybe humans shouldn't play with particle physics as one part of the universe is apt to effect another part. Or... maybe Jesus is coming back to the Earth. Or both.
Originally posted by Now_Then
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. Either that or some dust on the Hubble lenses, so someone tell NASA to get some Windex up there too. [Sky and Telescope]
Thats a nice line!
Originally posted by kelbtalfenek
Very interesting. I can't say what that could be either.
Makes me wonder though, if it's part of a trickle of information/disinformation that we might see more of at a later date...
It is suggested that the origin of this transient is a stellar merger and that an entire class of similar transients, luminous red novae, exists.
There is no prior detection of a source at the transient’s location in the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (Condon et al. 1998) at 1.4 GHz to the survey 5 detection limit of 2.5 mJy beam−1. There is no X-ray detection at this location in a 5 ks exposure in the Chandra Telescope XBootes survey (Kenter et al. 2005) to the detection limit of 7.8 × 10−15 erg cm−2 s−1 in the full 0.5-7 keV band.