It will always be the case that that which we do not know is far greater than that which we do. I love a good mystery. Whether it is a mystery about who ate my lunch, or why any woman would ever fall for Mike Holland, it doesn’t matter to me, I just like the unknown. Recently, the Hubble space telescope witnessed an event. It was a mysterious flash of light lasting about 100 days. There was nothing, then there was something, then there was nothing again. The flash of light had a completely unknown spectrum, ruling out a supernova. According to one researcher from CERN, the object looked similar to “the flash that an Imperial Star Destroyer does when reaching warp 10.” I disagree though because imperial star destroyer flashes look more like plaid. The object’s distance is even a mystery. Estimates put it anywhere between 39.87 million and 3.37 billion parsecs from Earth. With the Universe only spanning roughly 93 billion light years, or 27.6 billion parsecs (current estimate), that gives us a margin of error roughly 10 percent the size of the universe (and yes, I worked the unit parsec into this post. Deal with it!). That’s like me saying that my brother’s loft is somewhere between my house and New York City. Stranger still, the object was observed in the space between galaxies. Apparently, there is something out there, and it can react extremely violently. I would like to think that it was an alien species turning on their own Large Hadron Collider. It could also be a space ship exploding, like the death star, but bigger. We may never know what the object was and why it created a burst of light lasting 100 days, but at least we have a good mystery.

Update: THere is a new mystery…why wouldn’t the picture for this post work correctly?  It has been removed because it was problematic.