And Now for Something Really Important…

by on June 13, 2006 · 4 comments

The Register reports on what is quite possibly the awesomest object in the universe:

Astronomers have identified a massive comet-like structure – spanning a whopping three million light years – that is tearing through a distant galaxy cluster at more than 750 kilometres a second.

Yes, you read that right. A great ball of fiery gas, some five thousand million times the size of the solar system. Fortunately, it isn’t anywhere near Earth. The flaming gas-ball is in the Abell 3266 galaxy cluster, even more millions of light years away from us than it is across.

The fireball, which is the largest object of this kind ever identified, was spotted by stargazers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-Ray telescope.

The author of the article showed remarkable restraint in avoiding references to “great balls of fire.”

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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