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Did you know in 1983,4 Nasa found a strange object with 4 to 8 times Earth mass using IRAS(orbital infrared telescope), at the edge of our Solar system
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That was "US News and World Report." I saw copies of the news reports. The first was dated sometime in September, 1983.
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The purpose of science is to explore, understand, and find new, strange things. It is always a delight when receiving new data that the unexpected has been found. Every space mission so far has pushed the boundaries of our knowledge and further exposed the beauty and deep mystery of the universe. With every mission, we hope that well find something so staggering that it will revolutionize our view of the cosmos.
However, what this staggering bit of data, or the emphasis behind it, is to a trained scientist and a journalist looking for a hot story to publish are, sadly, not always the same thing.
The Washington Post, 31 Dec, 1983 published an article entitled "Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered"
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A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an orbiting telescope aboard the U.S. infrared astronomical satellite. So mysterious is the object that astronomers do not know if it is a planet, a giant comet, a nearby "protostar" that never got hot enough to become a star, a distant galaxy so young that it is still in the process of forming its first stars or a galaxy so shrouded in dust that none of the light cast by its stars ever gets through. "All I can tell you is that we don't know what it is," Dr. Gerry Neugebauer, IRAS chief scientist for California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Institute of Technology said in an interview.
The most fascinating explanation of this mystery body, which is so cold it casts no light and has never been seen by optical telescopes on Earth or in space, is that it is a giant gaseous planet, as large as Jupiter and as close to Earth as 50 billion miles. While that may seem like a great distance in earthbound terms, it is a stone's throw in cosmological terms, so close in fact that it would be the nearest heavenly body to Earth beyond the outermost planet Pluto. "If it is really that close, it would be a part of our solar system," said Dr. James Houck of Cornell University's Center for Radio Physics and Space Research and a member of the IRAS science team. "If it is that close, I don't know how the world's planetary scientists would even begin to classify it."
The mystery body was seen twice by the infrared satellite as it scanned the northern sky from last January to November, when the satellite ran out of the supercold helium that allowed its telescope to see the coldest bodies in the heavens. The second observation took place six months after the first and suggested the mystery body had not moved from its spot in the sky near the western edge of the constellation Orion in that time. "This suggests it's not a comet because a comet would not be as large as the one we've observed and a comet would probably have moved," Houck said. "A planet may have moved if it were as close as 50 billion miles but it could still be a more distant planet and not have moved in six months time.
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Let me emphasis the statement "All I can tell you is that we don't know what it is", again.
At the time of this article, the astronomers were excited by new and mysterious data. They were still working on the data and trying to form some conclusions from it.
Did they ever figure out what the mystery object(s) was?
Of course, they did.
They published the results in the trade journals (
The IRAS view of the extragalactic sky, IN: Annual review of astronomy and astrophysics. Volume 25 (A88-13240 03-90). Palo Alto, CA, Annual Reviews, Inc., 1987, p. 187-230. NASA-supported research.).
The results were, from a layman's perspective, prosaic and uninteresting, as IRAS had discovered a class of
luminous IR galaxy.
No death planets. No fat-headed aliens. No UFOs.
Excuse me for being critical here, but it would be an assumption of mine that as an author, you would have already performed far more time researching your book than the four hours I have spent digging through old journals.