An Exceptional Object

~ Cheryl

On Wednesday NASA put out a press release to say that they would be holding a special, televised news conference on Monday to discuss “the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.” There is no indication in the press release as to what this object might be, how it is exceptional, or what NASA means by “cosmic neighborhood”.

UFO websites are all over this. They are, of course, hoping that “exceptional object” means “starship” and “cosmic neighborhood” means “our solar system”. Millenarianist cults are doubtless hoping that it means a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Given that Chandra is an X-Ray telescope, whatever it has detected is presumably very hot. That could be the exhaust gases from a starship, but it would be a pretty dangerous form of propulsion. It seems very unlikely that it could be anything like an asteroid or comet. It presumably isn’t the giant energy bubbles at the center of the galaxy, because they are primarily gamma ray emitters and were discovered by the Fermi telescope.

What Chandra is good at spotting, however, is supernovas. So for the benefit of Kendall, who put me onto this story and is eagerly waiting to be scared, I shall predict that Chandra has discovered a nearby supernova that is about to bathe the Earth in deadly radiation and we are all going to die. Of course this is “about to” on a cosmological timescale, so we may have a few centuries to enjoy ourselves before it happens.

Those of you with much better astrophysics knowledge than me are welcome to tell me that I’m completely wrong here.

20 thoughts on “An Exceptional Object”

  1. Leave it to me to run across something that’s probably a supernova or other extinction event…eek! I’ll be checking your blog (and elsewhere) Monday to find out what NASA’s big scare announcement is.

    Thanks for the energy bubble link, BTW–I hadn’t read about that yet. That’s a pretty wild image (artist’s conception?).

  2. Whoops, I forgot to check the ‘notify’ checkbox. Sorry, I hate posting a note just to subscribe. (blush)

  3. I don’t think there are any promising SN precursors close enough to be a danger to the Solar System.

    Now, two close-orbiting neutron stars could be close but not necessary easy to spot. I think.

    I will plunk for “blue-shifted and low parallax relativistic beam, akin to what an interstellar rocket decelerating into the Solar System might look like.”

  4. I don’t think there are any promising SN precursors close enough to be a danger to the Solar System.

    And I believe it has been shown that contrary to early results, WR 104 does not have one of its poles pointed almost directly at us and so we will probably survive the upcoming supernova even if it produces a jet and even if the explosion is particularly large. Previously a “mouse in the microwave” scenario was not out of the question.

    1. What Mr. Nicoll said. If every nearby supernova were a potential extinction event, life wouldn’t have lasted this long.

      My bet, though I wouldn’t put a lot of money on it, is they’ve finally found an indisputable black hole. For all that black holes feel like familiar objects, no one’s actually announced direct proof that one exists yet.

  6. Something I didn’t realize about supernovae until recently is that because stars form in clusters and because stars that can become SN don’t last long, SN probably sometimes happen in clusters too. There’d be some spread due to differences in mass and therefore lifespan but it would really suck to develop astronomy just in time to realize one’s home system had drifted into the middle of a cosmic demolition zone where SN were going to happen every few hundred thousand years for the foreseeable future (although obviously the hypothetical home system would only be passing though the danger zone for a few million years).

    That said, I don’t think any of the known mass extinctions on Earth have “nearby supernova” as a probable cause. Impact, yes, volcanoes, yes, when climates go bad, yes, apes with fire and spears, yes, exploding stars, disappointingly no.

    1. Other than the end of the Cretaceous and the current one, all the mass extinctions have happened on a reliable, approximately 63-million-year cycle. A couple years ago it was shown that this matches the period with which our solar system wobbles back and forth in the galactic disk, with the extinction events coming when we’re as close to the north face of the galaxy as we can get.

      There’s still debate as to exactly what’s going on over there. One speculation I remember seeing is that since our galaxy as a whole is moving in that direction, collisions with the intergalactic medium are happening more on that side and generating a higher level of inimical cosmic rays.

      1. I’m not sure which part of your comment scares me the most. Possibly this one:

        Other than the end of the Cretaceous and the current one, all the mass extinctions

        “and the current one”??? 😉

        1. We’re currently in one of the biggest, fastest mass extinctions in history. It’s down to humanity rather than external effects.

  7. You guys are such party poopers. Kendall wants to be terrified. If you are going to nix the supernova idea, at least come up with some other reason why we are all going to die.

  8. Simple entropy and the limits of error correction in replicating chemicals? I for one am extremely unhappy to be trying to run my mind in what amounts to a slab of fatty meat.

    Would slamming into an exceptionally dense bit of interstellar fluff be something Chandra could spot? We knew there are dense interstellar clouds, we know the solar system will run into one eventually (and may be running into the Local Fluff as we speak) and we know this could have at least some annoying consequences, like pushing the heliopause down below an AU. That’s not doooooooomsday but it could be More CancerDay or at least Unwanted Additional Global Environmental StressDay (except it would last for thousands of years).

    1. Interesting, but an X-Ray telescope is looking for things with temperatures in the millions of Kelvin. I’m not sure that fluff qualifies.

  9. It’s been awhile since I’ve had the pleasure of listening to an academic astronomer tentatively get very excited about (after many years of observation) coming to the guarded conclusion that the evidence might support a theory (unless, of course, it will in the fullness of time prove that the evidence supports a different theory, which would be a little disappointing, but okay too, because that would also be interesting). Truly it puts the concept of “delayed gratification” into a different realm. I loved it. Thanks for posting this, as otherwise I’d have missed it entirely.

    The short (probably inaccurate) summary is: thanks to observations made possible by the x-ray telescope, astronomers think there’s a good possibility that a supernova first observed 31 years ago in a nearby galaxy may have resulted in a black hole. If that proves true, they’ve got the opportunity to observe the development of a young (in terms of how long we’ve been able to see the light) black hole with a known birth date.

    I’m sorry that this doesn’t seem to pose any threat that might make Kendall frightened. (If it helps, Kendall, I’d guess that if there’s a reason for us to be frightened, they’d refrain from telling us at all, which is something we can be frightened about on a daily basis!)

    1. Thanks for the summary, Susan! Black holes have scared me ever since that old Disney movie *,but it’s tough to be too worried about one in another galaxy.

      * Not-really-related: Disney World’s Space Mountain roller coaster scarred me for life–though I got over it in the past 15 years and now enjoy roller coasters. 😉

  10. Okay, I got carried away by all the subordinate clauses I was hearing (and trying to reproduce) and dangled a modifier. The supernova is in a nearby galaxy, not the first observer. At least, not so far as we know.

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