-Caveat Lector- from The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/081799sci-mystery-star.html August 17, 1999 An Oddity in Space Baffles Experts By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD very night at their telescopes, astronomers invite the universe to a battle of wits. Surprise us, they say, with some teasing wink of light, some few cryptic clues to something unfamiliar and, better yet, an implied challenge to a cherished theory. In most cases, astronomers boast, we will have it figured out by dawn. Now astronomers have an unyielding mystery on their hands, something they have observed and pondered for three years, a point of light deep in the northern sky that appears to be like nothing seen before. This may turn out to be only a curiosity, an odd variation of a familiar phenomenon, or it may be the first evidence of some unsuspected object with reverberating theoretical implications. Detecting planets around other stars is the most celebrated recent discovery to challenge scientists, forcing them to rethink their theories about the formation and dynamics of planetary systems and take more seriously the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. The mystery object has so far confounded astronomers because they cannot decipher the language of its light. Usually, by breaking down the spectrum of light into its component elements and charting the spikes and dips on a graph, astronomers can identify and describe an object within minutes. In this case, however, astronomers are finding nothing familiar about the light spectrum, a couple of Everests representing emissions from the object surrounded by lower peaks and broad valleys of heavy elements that blot out the true contours of the object's nature. They are beginning to sympathize with archeologists who sought to read Egyptian hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone. "I've never seen a spectrum anything like this, and I take spectra for a living," said Dr. S. George Djorgovski, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who is the leader of the sky survey that detected the mystery object. Whatever the astronomers are seeing, it is probably not a star, at least not any normal star. The light signature of stars is much simpler than this object's. Nor is it a distant galaxy, which would have much different light patterns. With little evidence and even less conviction, some astronomers speculate that the object is a quasar, one of the sources of tremendous energies at the farthest reaches of the universe where the enormous gravitational power of black holes presumably gobbles up surrounding matter. If it is a quasar, it must be a rare kind beyond current understanding. "It doesn't look like a quasar to my eye, but I may be wrong," said Dr. Wallace Sargent, a Caltech astronomer and quasar specialist, who is also director of Palomar Observatory in Southern California, where the discovery was made. So if it is not a normal star, galaxy or strange quasar, astronomers say, the most intriguing possibility is that the mystery object is announcing the existence of an entirely new cosmic phenomenon. "But we must do everything to rule out the known before we postulate that we have discovered something really and truly new," Djorgovski said. Mystification is likely to be a more common experience in astronomy as more powerful telescopes and instruments with improved sensitivity are used for systematic probes deeper into the universe and over broader stretches of sky. Several comprehensive sky surveys under way or just beginning are expected to discover many rare or even previously unknown types of astronomical objects and forces. Exploring the entire northern sky in different color filters, for example, the Digital Palomar Sky Survey, now nearing completion, has collected data on more than 50 million galaxies and about 2 billion stars. The census has identified more than 70 quasars at such great distances that they are being seen at a time when the universe was less than 10 percent of its present age. One surprising discovery was a starlike light several hundred times brighter than the galaxy with which it was associated. Astronomers are not sure, but they suspect they were seeing the aftereffects of a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful events in the universe today. First detected in the 1960s, gamma-ray bursts are examples of an astronomical mystery that is only now being solved. For the survey, astronomers devised computer programs to sift through processed photographs for starlike objects, then distinguish the stars from galaxies and isolate rare points of light that are not immediately recognizable. This was how the new mystery object showed up. Djorgovski and his team -- Dr. Stephen Odewahn, Dr. Robert Brunner and Roy Gal, a graduate student -- examined the object's light spectrum. Some of the lines of emissions, especially the two Everest spikes, looked too sharp to be from a quasar. They combed the star catalogs and published research papers, but found nothing like it. A search in the archives of X-ray and infrared surveys failed to show anything in those wavelengths at the location where the object's visible light was detected. Radio antennas of the Very Large Array in New Mexico scanned the same patch of sky. They picked up only weak radio emissions from the region; many quasars have proved to be "radio loud." "This was the first one of something new, and a complete mystery to us," Djorgovski said. By this time in most investigations of strange sightings, the mystery would have been solved. In fact, it would probably have been explained before the observing night was over. In several decades of observations, Sargent recalled being stumped only once by a strange spectrum, which turned out to be light from an exploding star, a supernova, in the late stages of its evolution. "We couldn't identify it for several hours," he said, "and that's a long time for unsolved mysteries." The next step for Djorgovski's team was to photograph the object again and again. Some aspects of the spectrum reminded them of a supernova a few days after the explosion. But in the pictures, the light from the object did not die down, as it would as a supernova faded. "The light doesn't vary, doesn't move and doesn't erupt," Djorgovski said, reflecting the team's growing bewilderment. Other examinations ruled out the possibility that the object was an aging white dwarf star, where strong magnetic fields had distorted normal spectral lines. Comparisons with all other examples of peculiar stars also failed to suggest a solution. It is not even clear from the spectrum whether the object is extremely far away or relatively close by. Distances are estimated by the shift of light to the red end of the spectrum, a sign of the object's velocity as it recedes from the observer in the expanding universe. At this point, the Caltech astronomers started showing the puzzling spectrum to quasar and stellar astronomers elsewhere. In a presentation at the June meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago, Djorgovski issued a challenge to all colleagues to help solve the mystery. When he first saw the spectrum, Dr. Richard L. White, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, surmised that this could be a subspecies of quasars. One small segment of the mystery object's spectrum looked a little like one small segment of a spectrum from what astronomers know as broad-absorptionline quasars. Some 10 percent of the known quasars fall into this category. A spectrum of most quasars, White explained, is distinguished by broad lines of the light emitted by gases, mainly hydrogen, moving around the nucleus of the object. A small number of quasars, though, produce a spectrum with broad absorption lines, which dip low like the Dow Jones average on a bad week. These dips record the absorption of some of the object's emitted light by intervening gases, hydrogen and sometimes heavy elements like carbon, magnesium and iron. The mystery object's spectral absorption line for iron was the one part that reminded White of a broad-absorption quasar. "When I heard George give a talk, I bet the object is a broad-absorptionline quasar," he said. "For all I know, it could be something quite different. So much of the emitted light has been chopped away and completely obscured by the absorption lines that you can't recognize what it is you're seeing." Djorgovski said he tended to agree with White that the mystery object was probably a rare kind of quasar. "We may find it's a sub-sub-subspecies of quasars for which there may be only one example," he said. Or it could be something entirely new. "We can't think we have discovered all the kinds of things there are out there," he added. The strategy of conducting wide surveys of the sky with new telescopes is to make a census of the known universe, chart the outlines of large-scale structure like superclusters of galaxies and, through the sheer numbers of detected objects, discover new and unexpected phenomena. In some of the first observations by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an even more ambitious undertaking begun this year, astronomers detected an entirely new category of dim, reddish objects that scientists are calling "methane brown dwarfs." These are objects sometimes called failed stars, smaller than a star and larger than a planet and, in this case, with atmospheres rich in methane. "We are at the beginning of a lot of new surveys of the sky, with more data about more objects going into the computers," White said. "It would be really shocking if we didn't find new, strange objects." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company ================================= Robert F. Tatman [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remove "nospam" from the address to reply. NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml POSTING THIS MESSAGE TO THE INTERNET DOES NOT IMPLY PERMISSION TO SEND UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL (SPAM) TO THIS OR ANY OTHER INTERNET ADDRESS. RECEIPT OF SPAM WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION OF THE SENDER'S ISP. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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