Riddle: Solved
Quick, what's a Galactic object, detectable in X-rays, that astronomers have been hunting for since the mid-20th century?
I feel like I should know this... Gah, it's driving me mad.
[Helmet tip to Bad Astronomy Blog.]
Update: It's a supernova, the youngest/most recent ever found.
Chandra press release: Discovery of Most Recent Supernova in Our Galaxy
Bad Astronomy Blog: Youngest galactic supernova (not aliens) found
Hey, gigantic X-ray explosions in space are still pretty cool, even if they aren't black holes or aliens.
posted by Jennifer @ 12:35 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Umm, black hole.
Really? That seems like it's too obvious to be correct.
Maybe it's the black hole at the center of the Galaxy? But I thought they already found that. If nit was something really faint or cool, I would have had some guesses, but X-rays?
I was gonna write black hole too, but the Milky Way one has already been observed like Benjamin wrote.
Perhaps evidence of technology elsewhere? That would be kind of earth shattering news. Search for extraterrestrial life began 50 years ago.
Looks like many people are going wild that evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (or at least life) has finally been found, but SETI looks in the radio, and these are X-rays. If I remember correctly, radio waves are relatively cheap energy-wise to generate and easy to use for encoding signals, which is why it's more likely that a civilization would use them to broadcast a signal, or so the logic goes. There's just not much point in deliberately beaming X-rays across the Galaxy.
Plus the press release says "object," which narrows it down to, well, an object, as opposed to a signal or an event or something. Or possibly a whole bunch of objects in a group.
Today I'm thinking it's probably something that the general public will probably yawn at, like some sort of slightly different kind of X-ray pulsar that supplies the missing data point in some well-known graph and confirms some really obscure theory about star evolution. That's why I feel like I should know it.
I'm guessing better observation of a black hole, then.
Still, Bug Eyed Monsters would be pretty cool. I was thinking just yesterday how Fermi's Paradox is kind of depressing for us.
Squamous purple ovoids!
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