Word: objection
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...first to be a garden-variety star--but it wasn't. It might have turned out to be an unremarkable galaxy or quasar--but it didn't. Frustrated in their attempts to learn its nature, and even its distance from Earth, astronomers have begun to refer to the mystery object as, well, the "mystery object...
Just what the enigmatic body is has been the subject of much buzz in the astronomical community--and deservedly so. Astronomer S. George Djorgovski and his team at the California Institute of Technology first spotted the object in color photographs taken for an ongoing digitized survey of the northern skies. In one of the images, they noticed what seemed to be an oddly colored star in the constellation Serpens (the snake...
Intrigued, the Caltech team turned a larger telescope on the object to analyze its light. They were confident that the resulting spectrum, not unlike the band of colors that appears when sunlight is passed through a prism, would tell them a lot. "Once you have a star's spectrum," says Djorgovski, "you can determine its temperature, its heavy elements and how fast it's moving with respect to Earth...
Ordinarily, astronomers can take the measure of a star within hours after obtaining its spectrum. But when the Caltech astronomers got their first look at this object's spectrum, displayed in the form of an EKG-like graph on a computer screen, they were shocked. "Our mouths fell open," says Djorgovski. "I suspect that what we said was not printable. But the gist of it was, 'What the heck is this...
...spectrum has two large peaks that may or may not mark an ample presence of an as yet unidentified element, and many small dips that probably represent segments of the spectrum where light has been absorbed by other elements--perhaps those in the object's outer atmosphere or in gas clouds between the object and Earth. Bewildered, the Caltech team looked for other answers. Maybe the object was a supernova, an exploding star, which often projects what Djorgovski calls a "weird-looking" spectrum. But the team observed the target a number of times over several months and noted no change...