As is my habit, I was scanning through the news today, and came upon a story that really caught my attention: the Hubble telescope has spotted some sort of mysterious object in space. While this is hardly the first time that’s happened, this time, there’s a twist: the object behaves like nothing else we’ve ever seen. It’s been described as belonging to a possible “new class of astronomical object.” Apparently, it appeared, brightened, and dimmed, and disappeared within a few hundred days. Here’s the really weird part: nobody knows what it is. The way it brightened and dimmed isn’t consistent with a supernova or any other kind of known object. Additionally, it moved so strangely that nobody knows how far away it was. According to astronomers, it could have been anywhere between 130 and 11,000,000,000 light-years away.
Being a sometimes writer of science fiction, it’s hard not to speculate as to what the Mystery Thingy might have been, but even if it was something fairly mundane, this is still pretty exciting.
You can read more about the Mystery Thingy (which I’m hoping will catch on as the object’s official name) here.
