Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky
It’s not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.
In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it’s made of.
Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.
But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn’t been one before.
Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.
Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.
Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn’t get signatures for any known elements.
“Because we can’t see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can’t tell if it’s even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy,” Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.
It’s not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.
All the scientists know is that it’s no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.
As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, “that leaves a lot of leeway.”
“We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar,” Barbary told New Scientist, “or might be able to shed some light on it.”
Large Hadron Collider – Could The World End Next Wednesday, Scientists Ask
Two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world. In the first, there is little warning. For maybe a month there would be no sign that life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for all living things on Earth.
Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting geologists that something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss.
After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach catastrophic proportions.
Cities would be levelled, the oceans would rise and wash in a series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world’s coasts, killing millions.
The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, not along well-known geological faultlines, would be proof that something devastating was afoot.
Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical scale. The Earth would literally start to crack up.
Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to boil.
Mega-hurricanes would level buildings and forests the world over. Eventually, mountains would crumble as the Earth’s crust continued to disintegrate.
The fabric of the planet itself would start to disappear, trillions of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of unimaginable force.
From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish down a plughole in a flash of light.
At least in this scenario we would have a little time, perhaps, to come to terms with the end.
However, a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying. There would be no warning at all.
In an instant – about one-twentieth of a second – the entire Earth would simply vanish from space.
Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit. Eight minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of light.
Any extra-terrestrials out there would die too, in due course. And there would be nothing technology could do about it.
But why should we now be worrying about such possible causes of Armageddon?
The answer is a gargantuan machine – the largest, most expensive scientific experiment in history, the ‘Large Hadron Collider’, to be turned on next Wednesday.
Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions of life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the entire cosmos.
This gigantic £4 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device ever built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles which make up our Universe.
It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18 miles long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of ‘heavy’ subatomic particles, ‘hadrons’, will take place in the hope that the innermost workings of matter and energy will be revealed.
The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built by Mankind.
MICHAEL HANLON: Are we all going to die next Wednesday? | Mail Online
