[extropy-chat] Enigmatic object baffles supernova team

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Jun 19, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> What a strange article.  It variously says the object could be 5.5
> billion light years away, 12 billion light years away or in our own
> galaxy.  In short it doesn't seem we know much other than the raw
> data.   Very odd.


Yeah, that is what caught my attention.  It isn't that they do not  
have some good data -- they have marshaled some nice assets for  
observations -- but that they are having a hard time making the raw  
data fit any conventional model.  I've already caught opinions from a  
couple professional astronomers (though neither specializing in this)  
and the gist is that they find it very weird and therefore very  
interesting, but are at a loss for a meaningful opinion of what it  
might be based on the data presented.  Too many anomalies in too many  
different dimensions to reasonably shoehorn it as an outlier of some  
well-known class given the current data.

J. Andrew Rogers