February 2, 2010 - Break out the Romulan ale and start perfecting your best Cylon walk, the aliens are coming to town, and they are PISSED! Okay, that might be jumping the gun a little, but a recent discovery by Hubble of an unknown flying object in space has the scientific community puzzled as to just what exactly the projectile might be. Never-before-seen asteroid or Geth warship? Oh, the possibilities.
Hubble first detected the X-shaped object in late January and clocked it at 11,000mph. Dubbed P/2010-A2, experts think that what they're looking at could be a comet that was produced out of the collision of two asteroids, even though the object is exhibiting behavior that researchers have never seen before in comets.
"This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets," said UCLA investigator David Jewitt. "The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies."
Hubble Detects Mysterious Spaceship-Shaped Object Traveling at 11,000MPH
Hubble has discovered a mysterious X-shaped object traveling at 11,000mph. NASA says that P/2010-A2 may be a comet, product of the collision between two asteroids. Or a Klingon Bird of Prey. Either way, UCLA investigator David Jewitt is excited:
Click above to see the full resolution image
This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets. The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.
OK, David, we will believe you until Jerry Bruckheimer finish his next movie, in which a "comet" suddenly stops, turns to Earth, and starts firing anti-matter rays against our underpants.
The weirdest thing, however, is not only the prettyful X-shaped debris pattern, but the fact that its 460-foot-wide nucleus is outside the dust halo and separated from the trail. This behavior is something which has never been seen before in a comet or any other solar-system-swooshing object.
The images—taken by Hubble between January 25 and January 29—lead NASA to believe that this is a product of the collision of two asteroids. The nucleus would be the "surviving remnant of a hypervelocity collision:
"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight. The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process.
In other words: They have no clue about what this is, and they are still speculating about how this object was formed. Maybe it's time to call Dr. Zarkov. [NASA]
A collision of two asteroids? Perhaps, but in my experience the collision of two heavy objects rarely results in bilateral symmetry. Awesome picture.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 9:21 pm
by DrVolin
11 kmph relative to what? That's slower than a sunday stroll in terms of space travel. In comparison, the Earth is barelling along at more than 65 kmph around the sun, and that's not terribly fast.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 9:27 pm
by Nordic
This is far more interesting than a radar malfunction.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:11 pm
by Wombaticus Rex
Yeah, got this emailed a few days back -- gorgeous shot. Definitely no hard kernel / aliasing bullshit afoot here, this is a real pretty mystery.
My vote: plasma-based chronovore. Hopefully it didn't smell us.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:26 pm
by 82_28
DrVolin wrote:11 kmph relative to what? That's slower than a sunday stroll in terms of space travel. In comparison, the Earth is barelling along at more than 65 kmph around the sun, and that's not terribly fast.
Don't have time to look it up. But wouldn't that be 65 kilometers per second? Cos that's not terribly fast either.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:34 pm
by Wombaticus Rex
DrViolin meant 11,000 miles per hour versus 65,000 miles per hour
The "k" was a mashup of two rival systems of measurement, strictly for style points
at least, that's my theory
The Galaxy Song
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:10 am
by freemason9
DrVolin wrote:11 kmph relative to what? That's slower than a sunday stroll in terms of space travel. In comparison, the Earth is barelling along at more than 65 kmph around the sun, and that's not terribly fast.
I'm fairly certain that it means 11,000 kph relative to each other; that is, two asteroids collided at a relative speed of 11,000 kph.
That isn't slow at all, when you consider that--if these were, indeed, two asteroids--they were both in the asteroid belt and were revolving in their orbits around the sun. Although they had unique orbital elements (eccentricity, elliptical degrees, etc.), they finally "bumped" into one another.
That's what the guy is referring to, although how he came up with 11,000 instead of 10,000 or 15,000 is beyond me. Perhaps the astronomer spoke in different units of measurement, and the journalist took the liberty of converting to km.
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 8:01 pm
by kafor
thanks Mr. W. Rex for the "Galaxy Song". It's the first laugh out loud moment for way to long. "cause there's bugger all down here on earth"
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 8:04 pm
by justdrew
kafor wrote:thanks Mr. W. Rex for the "Galaxy Song". It's the first laugh out loud moment for way to long. "cause there's bugger all down here on earth"
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 6:27 pm
by Nordic
To me it's really interesting how whenever anything like this comes up, people are quite "ho hum" about it.
Was it always thus?
Were humans always like "hey, look at that big light in the sky that's never been there before! Cool. Okay, let's go back to throwing rocks at each other".
It seems not, because history is replete with stories of magical occurences, lights in the sky, flaming chariots, angry gods, myths that surround things like eclipses, etc.
But now it seems nobody quite knows what to do, or think. I think this is all part of hte passivity of modern man. We all expect "authorities" (i.e. talking heads on TV) to explain everything to us, and to tell us when to be scared, and when to relax, so if there's no authorative "talking head" going on about it, well, it mustn't be very important. Time to see what else is on, ooh look! Football! The Oscars!
I'm starting to think that a massive UFO could settle over a major city and most people would look up at it and wonder, for a little bit, then would just go on about their merry way, completely ignoring it, as long as the "talking head" authority figures brushed it off.
Same goes for the "Norway Spiral".
Re: Hubble Telescope Discovers UFO
Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 7:36 pm
by yathrib
Very interesting how differently this can be framed depending upon one's belief systems. My pentecostal relatives are saying that it's in the shape of a cross and the Hebrew letter Tau, and that the meaning is salvation (symbolized by the cross) and "Now" somehow symbolized by the tau. For some reason, the thing reminds me of this:
What ever became of it? Did it dissipate as scientists said it would if it were, in fact, a collision of asteroids? Scientists claim, btw, that this has happened many times in the billions of years of the solar system's existence, but that we were not around to see it.
Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:09 pm
