10-31-2016, 07:35 PM
It's fair to point out that although Pan-STARRS is used to detect and monitor near-Earth asteroids, the same telescope can also be used to make other astronomical discoveries. This just made the news today:
"Hypervariable galactic nuclei"
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-hypervariab...uclei.html
These are extremely distant galaxies so the observations are looking back billions of years, but to have whole galaxies change brightness so quickly is hard to understand. I like the idea of microlensing, but since these galaxies, at the time we can observe them, are still quite young, then other explanations can't be ruled out, such as objects being swallowed by a massive black hole.
"Hypervariable galactic nuclei"
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-hypervariab...uclei.html
These are extremely distant galaxies so the observations are looking back billions of years, but to have whole galaxies change brightness so quickly is hard to understand. I like the idea of microlensing, but since these galaxies, at the time we can observe them, are still quite young, then other explanations can't be ruled out, such as objects being swallowed by a massive black hole.