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MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Mystery object
I took an image of Markarian’s Chain on 21 April and after I processed it, I noticed two very prominent, blue-shifted objects. One is galaxy IC 3355; however, there is a bigger and brighter one, near to galaxy NGC 4425, which doesn’t appear in any other image I’ve found. It’s clearly visible in my stacked pre-processed image too, indicating that it isn’t a processing artefact. It was captured with a ZWO ASI183MC Pro camera through an Evostar ED72 telescope. The best 10 frames of 25x 450-second captures at 111 gain were stacked in DeepSkyStacker and processed with GIMP, StarNet and Topaz DeNoise AI. What do you think it could be?
Greg Sanders via email
What an intriguing find, Greg! Stretching the image showed the unidentified blue object is something linear, suggesting that it could be the track of asteroid 521 Brixia, which was in that region at that time and shining at mag. +13.7. However, asteroid 194 Prokne was also around there on that date, shining at mag. +13.2, but can’t be seen in your image. Other than that, the track of Brixia looks a decent match. – Ed.
This month’s top prize: two Philip’s titles
The ‘Message of the Month’ writer will receive a bundle of two top titles courtesy of astronomy publisher Philip’s: Nigel Henbest’s Stargazing 2023 and Robin Scagell’s Guide to the Northern Constellations
Winner’s details will be passed on to Octopus Publishing to fulfil the prize
Keep it simple
I’ve just finished reading Chris Lintott’s article, ‘Dark matter could be made of black holes’ (Cutting Edge, April 2023) in which he reports about tiny black holes being a possible explanation for the glue holding galaxies together. Most of the systems we know, whether small like the atom or large like the Solar System, are held together by forces we’re already aware of. Would it be reasonable to assume the same forces are at work here and we’re simply looking at a scaled-up version of what we know? It was Ptolemy who said it’s a good principle to explain an issue in the simplest possible hypothesis; I also refer to Occam’s razor. By the way, I’m a new subscriber. Congratulations on a great magazine – I’m hooked!
Tom Jones, via email
Antique Space Age
Jonathan Powell’s article (‘The very, very early Space Race’’, April 2023 issue) got me thinking of the wrongly fictionalised Cyrano de Bergerac, the 17th-century French
