Now You See It, Now You Don't

Don't get the idea that we've found every kind of astronomical object there is in the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of.


The project used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor very distant galaxy clusters for supernovae. On February 21, 2006, in the direction of a far-away cluster in the Bootes constellation, Hubble began seeing something brighten.

It continued brightening for about 100 days and it then faded away over a similar timescale, until nothing was left in view. Its spectrum was like nothing ever seen. Even the cause of the spectral features is unknown.

(via Neatorama)