Unidentified Object Rushes Out Of Milky Way

Volunteers who were scanning old data from NASA’s WISE mission (discontinued in 2011) have made a remarkable finding: A faint, fast-moving object that is speeding out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes confirmed the discovery, which has been dubbed CWISE J1249. Exactly what it is remains unclear, as it seems too large to be a planet but too small and dim to be a star. The current best guess is that it may be a brown dwarf. Paper here, press release here.

Check out this video on techno-optimism! Billionaire and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently released a 5000 word essay coined the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, which covers his views of the world from the perspective of a “techno-optimist”. I read it so you don't have to.

You can now create and share your own quizzes on QuizWithIt – for free! Just set up an account and creator profile and you are good to go. Create quizzes to go with websites, videos, blogposts, podcasts, or as standalone. Your audience can support you by subscribing to your content, which allows them to collect points by taking your quizzes. Each quiz has a unique URL, can be embedded into websites or newsletter, and be shared on X, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Happy quizzing!

Wow, It Was Hydrogen (Probably)

Photo of the 1977 printout, where the Wow-signal appears as “6EQUJ5”. Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory.

In August 1977, Jerry R. Ehman found a remarkably bright and narrow signal in the astronomical data from the telescope at Ohio State University. He was so astonished, he scribbled “Wow!” on the printout, and it has been called “the Wow! signal” ever since. Despite many scans of the area that the signal emerged from, in the constellation Sagittarius, no further signals from there were ever detected. Now, Abel Méndez, from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, says he has figured it out. Analysing data from the Arecibo telescope (which collapsed in 2020), he concluded that the source is most likely a secondary emission from a hydrogen cloud. He says there probably was an earlier, primary emission, such as a magnetar flare (which would not fit the observations), that collectively excited the atoms in the hydrogen cloud, resulting in a spectrally very narrow and bright emission. Will that settle it? I doubt it. Press release here.

Experts Surprised by Fast Pace of Quantum Computing Progress

In a recent survey among quantum computing experts, about half said that the technology is developing faster or much faster than expected. The survey was conducted this year in June and July and had 927 participants from both quantum computing companies and academia. Those working for quantum computing companies see the current biggest challenge as scalability. I think it would be more interesting to survey those who have left the field. More details here.

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