Now THIS is interesting...

From UNIVERSE TODAY...

This past Wednesday, NASA announced they have scheduled a press conference for next Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to reveal the discovery of an object in our galaxy that astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.

Full story here.

So, what does everyone think? What have we been looking for for half a century..? Liquid water on Mars? (a very timely announcement before Phoenix lands...) An Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone? An Earth-sized planet beyond Pluto in our own solar system? A funny Eddie Murphy film? Can't wait to find out...!!

Earth like exo-planet is my vote.

did we not already have a couple of those?? I guess they could be even more earth-like...

Mmm...Chandra is involved somehow, so I'd have to go with some sort of high-energy object. A substellar mass black hole? A very nearby neutron star?

Puzzling, though; trying to think of what we've been looking for for 50 years in the X-ray band.

Perhaps a Supernova within our galaxy? With our luck, it's on the opposite side, and only visible through radar and infrared...

Maybe a quark star?

Hardly, 50 years ago quarks weren't even known, let alone the concept of a quark star. Knowing NASA's track record, the release is always less out-of-this-world than what we expect. I'd go for something to do with the central supermassive black hole.

Ahh - didn't spot the Xray ref - can't imagine it being exoplanetary if it's that.

Doug

My first thought was also that it could be a supernova

Hum,
indeed.

The word on the street says says it's the identification of Type Ia Supernova progenitors.

Looking at suggestions on the linked page at the top of this thread...

Population III White Dwarf. Dunno if it'd be emitting much X-rays, though.

The only exotic, high-energy objects discovered in the 50's were supernova remnants and radio galaxies latter were pathetically un-understood. Quasars and pulsars were discoveries of the 60's.

Right now, I'd suspect something to do with a supernova remnant, but oher than the suggestion above, I don't have a clue, given that Chandra was involved.

It's a poser alright! The only clues are the Chandra / X ray observations, and the phrase "an object in our galaxy that astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years." Luckily for the kook count over the next few days, Drake's first experimental observations weren't until 1960. ( Yes, I confess... I checked.. . ) Pulsars - no, that can't be it; LGM-1 was in 1967. Likewise magnetars weren't conceived until 1992. Black holes in our galaxy? That wouldn't be anything new (anyone remember the animation of stars whipping around Sag A* a few years ago?) AGN and quasars aren't in our galaxy,..

So, what was first theorised between, say, the 30s and the late 50s? Supernova precursors sounds plausible, what was happening in SN research back then? Perhaps an emerging pattern in emissions from Eta Carinae, perhaps..? (Hmmm, why do I keep thinking of Jeff Goldblum? ) Questions, questions...

Edit: I see Chandra has carried out a campaign of Eta Carinae observations; see e.g. http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/etacar/ for a gorgeous image from last year - i.

Concur. Prepare to be underwhelmed, unless you happen to be an astrophysicist, and even then...

Note well....

this is a media tele-briefing... it did *** NOT *** rate a full press conferenece.

Considering the yawnable crud that NASA sometimes puts on the public NASA TV channel......

Well, they gotta produce results of some sort to stay funded & employed, so I don't blame them for trying to start some buzz. Ever since Apollo 11, NASA's been between a rock and a hard place trying to keep programs alive, so it is eminently sensible of them to tout results of any sort.

It's we the public that tend to run wild in our heads & expect megadiscoveries when we hear something like this.

They can't win, can they? If they discover and take photographs of things but keep them to themselves.... like some organisations that shall remain nameless... they'd get booed for not being open. If they announce less-than-stunning discoveries to the world they run the risk of being accused of "sexing up" minor stories. I doubt the news next week will be anything mega-dramatic, or will make the man or woman or dog in the street sit up and say "wow!" but I say all credit to them for making sure people like us, who ARE interested in this stuff, know there's some new information coming their way.

Good analysis, Stu; they do indeed walk a fine line there.

The other big factor is that NASA is a continuous target for pandering spending cuts from all directions because (I'm not kidding) many if not most people think that their budget is on the order of hundreds of billions...so many people I talk to about this are flabbergasted to learn that it ain't so at all. They can't believe that NASA does all that it does for less then the normal annual operations & maintenance funding for fifteen Air Force fighter wings, annual per capita chewing gum consumption or a fraction of delivery pizza expenditures, etc., etc....not a lot of dough, basically, in the grand scheme of things.

The PR battle is deadly serious for NASA. It's less a matter of trying to expand then to merely keep the status quo viable.

Direct observation of a black hole would be my guess. This assumes people started "looking for" black holes after Finkelstein's 1958 paper.

D. Finkelstein (1958). "Past-Future Asymmetry of the Gravitational Field of a Point Particle". Phys. Rev. 110: 965–967. http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v110/i4/p965_1

--Greg

Hmm...yeah, I was sort of thinking along that vein. Do you suppose that they've finally been able to resolve Cygnus X-1 well enough to confirm its nature? I think that's the closest hole/supergiant pair we know of, unless some of the sources in Scorpius are closer.

I'm with you on this. In evrybody's mind that'll be something "new"

How about finding the stellar remnant from the 1006 supernova. The remnant (cloud) was discovered in 1965, slightly over 40 (edit- not 50) years ago, but no source star (which may no longer exist).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006

How time flies . .

Part of that 50 years was in Warp Factor 2

Phil

Edited. Clearly wasnt' paying attention - I was born in 1964, and I'm not over 50 yet

Whouaa! So, they're running this conference press for this?

Here's a wild thought... could they have found evidence of a "second sun" in our solar system? Maybe a v v v distant brown dwarf, that would effectively mean we live in a solar system with a binary star? You know, the old faithful 'Nemesis' idea..?

Hmmm... they made a point of saying "in our galaxy" tho... not "in our neighbourhood"...

Oh well, we'll know this time tomorrow...

That and I don't think brown dwarfs happen to be very bright in the X-ray spectrum.

Yeah. This almost has to be something black-hole related, I'd say, or at least some connection to neutron stars. Maybe they found a really old one of the latter, a slow rotator, that's fairly close? (It'd pretty much have to be to be found at all, I guess.)

EDIT: Oooo, cool thought: Maybe they've found strong evidence that Eta Carinae is very, very close to blowing, so we'd have the first advance notice of a major supernova!

Hmmm... I understand that, but then again it wouldn't have to be very bright, would it? Cos the discovery was made by Chandra AND ground-based telescopes... just thinking aloud here, is it possible for Chandra to catch a kind of "x-ray glimpse" of something faint in x-rays and then have ground telescopes look more closely..?

Here is the announcement, I think:
"Astronomers Find Youngest Supernova Remnant In Milky Way"
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Astronom...ky_Way_999.html

You're quite likely correct, since the link now reads:

>article withdrawn pending embargo ending at 18:00 BST

TTT (what's BST?)

That's British Summer Time (=UTC+1Hour).
Why do we have always a different reference time?!

Helen and I talked about this on the way home. Our considered opinion is that they'll announce they've found a watch they've been looking for for ages. You know - it's always in the last place you look!!

Dog

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/g19/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/g19/media/

And the actual article itself:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/g19/media/g19.pdf

That was the funniest tele-conf ever A complete nutter got on the line....twice

Doug

I didn't know that the Sunday Sport had a science correspondent.

Think the prize goes to Hendric in post#5. That '50-year' reference from the pre-announcement seems like a bit of a red herring, though.

So that was it, huh? Wow... very... um... exciting... I guess....

RE: >> bit of a red herring

Hum,
not really as this discovery goes some way towards solving why the rate of supernova explosions appears to be so low.
ie There should be on average three supernovas every century given that we live in a large spiral galaxy - but we don't see that number of supernova remnants. A mystery that has bugged astronomers for over 50 years.
It now seems that the remnants were just overlooked, or unseen due to their wavelengths.

Mmm...okay, I'll buy off on that. The teaser left a lot to the imagination, though. Guess that's a hallmark of good marketing, eh?

It also had the effect of sending the kooks into overdrive. In case anyone missed it, here is a couple of choice snippets from yesterday's briefing. In all my years of listening to NASA briefings, I've never heard such silly behavior before.

Click to view attachment

Yeesh. Well, that's the chronic danger of direct public interface...

BTW, wouldn't it be easier to just stomp the moon crickets instead of trying to scare them with a supernova remnant? I'm just asking...

Gadzooks. Schizophrenia is really a terrible disorder to hear in action, isn't it?