Monday, June 19, 2006

Enigmatic object baffles supernova team

Astronomers can only speculate on what the object is. "It could be some galactic variable [star], a supernova or a quasar. But none of those makes any sense," Dawson says.

The object's behaviour doesn't match any known quasar. The team is not convinced the object is outside our galaxy, but nothing like it is known inside the galaxy. Furthermore, the region of Bootes is a largely empty area of the sky far from the plane of the Milky Way.

(Via The Anomalist.)


Another candidate for ET megascale engineering?

"Mac's Law": Any sufficiently advanced cosmological artifact will likely be interpreted by Earthlings as some little-understood natural phenomenon.

2 comments:

razorsmile said...

Sounds like a corollary of Paul Hughes clarkism:

Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from nature.

Convergent thinking?

Mac said...

Hmmm. Those *are* pretty convergent. I wasn't ripping him off. I'm not even sure if we're talking about the same thing, exactly, but we're both coming from the same direction.