From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 18 1999 - 19:39:12 MDT
On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Larry Klaes wrote:
>
> Astronomers Baffled by Space Light
>
> ``It's fairly uncommon to stumble on something you don't
> have a clue about,'' astronomer S. George Djorgovski said
> Tuesday. ``It certainly hasn't happened to me, and I've
> been doing this for many years.''
>
> ...
>
> Some astronomers believe the object may be a new class of
> quasar, sources of energy found in the center of galaxies
> and believed to be powered by matter falling into massive
> black holes.
> ...
Djorgovski has a spectrum on his web site --
see links from:
http://astro.caltech.edu/~george/dposs/pr.html
or
http://astro.caltech.edu/~george/dposs/pecspec.ps
It shows a very noisy spectrum with two peaks at 580
and 620 nm. But the difference between the background
and the peaks is less than an order of magnitude.
I think most OSETI people argue that the advantage
of an OSETI signal is that it would outshine its
star by many orders of magnitude. Though I will
admit that most spectrometers have very long
observation times and the OSETI people at least
in some cases argue that the pulse widths would
be very short. So if the pulses are averaged over
the spectrometer exposure time, you could get the
observed peaks. To know any more would require
someone with device that can take nano- to micro-
second exposures of the PSS 1537+1227 to determine
if the bright peaks are being pulsed. I believe
Horowitz's Optical SETI group at Harvard may
be able to do this.
Robert Bradbury
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