Weird interstellar object?

So /pol/ and /x/ have been sperging about pic related for a few months now. Now considering both boards are batshit crasy, I figured, I'd ask here about what this is and whether it poses any threat to Earth. It appears to be moving towards Virgo if that helps at all

Other urls found in this thread:

google.com/sky/#latitude=-8.917651429640756&longitude=26.9384765625&zoom=6&Spitzer=0.00&ChandraXO=0.00&Galex=0.00&IRAS=100.00&WMAP=40.00&Cassini=0.00&slide=1&mI=-1&oI=-1
irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/IRIS/docs/miville-deschenes2005.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I'll post more of what gets posted in the threads about it on /x/

it's a weather balloon

Another screenshot from the threads, for whatever reason it's censored on Google Sky

This picture to me is semi-worrying because it looks like a black hole, and if that's moving towards Earth we're fucked

This picture is 2 spooky 4 me

It's also censored on NASA's website for whatever reason

Given that /x/ and /pol/ are freaking out about it, it's probably nothing

This has been bothering me for months now too. Why are NASA and Google censoring this image? I'd understand if there was just a weird glitch with Google Sky or something, but the fact that multiple independent sources have censored it is incredibly worrying.

Where do you think Google Sky gets its images from? They're not exactly known for having their own fleet of infrared astronomy satellites. Plus, it's only black space in the infrared, not in the microwave or visible spectra. Check it out.

>google.com/sky/#latitude=-8.917651429640756&longitude=26.9384765625&zoom=6&Spitzer=0.00&ChandraXO=0.00&Galex=0.00&IRAS=100.00&WMAP=40.00&Cassini=0.00&slide=1&mI=-1&oI=-1

So apparently the satellite that's taking all of these images is from the 80s and uses shutters that block out especially bright objects to allow for better exposure of the surrounding space, which might be why in most images this object is blocked out.

Well that part of the mystery is solved, now we need to figure out just what the hell the object is

If you read any of those you would know the answer. It's Saturn.

This field is right near the Ecliptic (the plane of the solar system in the sky) so it was probably always going to be a solar system object. If you look up the IRAS object catalogs you find these sources were saturated which means it was probably a Planet. I did a search on IPAC/IRSA's IRAS minor planet catalog. These objects were not included because they're saturated (and are not minor planets) but from that I found other entries in the same field which tells you the date this field was observed 14/07/83 at about noon in UT time. From this I can simply look up to coordinates of all the planets that day and Saturn was right there. The double object is because the field was exposed twice and stacks as the source catalog shows. The arc will just be an effect of the extremely bright object, in the other bands you can see the objects have big streaks not arcs. The saturated images are probably why the image was cut out of the reprocessed version, it's bad data. None of this stuff appears in more recent AKARI maps at similar wavelengths but background galactic cirrus does. That's a much better test than microwaves because it's much closer in wavelength, hence the microwave hotspot is almost certainly unrelated.
It's not the end of the world or biblical, it's Saturn.

Image for some proof. You can see the date the image was taken in in the table data at the bottom (8307 - 1983 07, 14.44 - the 14th at ~11 am). You can also see that date is in the ephemeris program I used showing it's Saturn. Mystery solved.

I sure hope it is.

Also if you look up the paper which describes the processing of IRIS they state they dealt with Saturn manually.

>This automatic method worked very well to identify automatically residual glitches and moving objects on most of the ISSA plates. It did not perform as well in very bright regions were the diffuse emission varies significantly at small scales. Therefore, we did not deglitch regions brighter than 200 MJy sr-1 at 100 um. We also dealt manually with Saturn because of its large extension in the affected HCONs.

irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/IRIS/docs/miville-deschenes2005.pdf

Pic related: It's Saturn, you can even see it move between the sub-exposures.

They're not censoring anything. Both of these archives deal with the IRIS reprocessing of IRAS data. As they stated the IRIS team removed Saturn because it is totally saturated and the data is therefore unusable. This data was processed for science not /x/ spergs, they removed it because it would contaminate any work being done with the maps in the future. Google doesn't do any processing, they just host the IRIS data as it was originally processed.

Note it's not masked in the original IRAS release so why would NASA censor data but keep the originals perfectly available? Conclusion /x/ is fucking retarded.

That one is creepy.
Is there where our Ayy LMAO overlords come from?

Don't be so paranoid. All that image is is a map of the around of Hydrogen over the whole sky. Here is a picture made from that same map. The bright band is not an accretion disk of a black hole, it's the band of the Milky Way stretching round the sky. The image is just a weird projection the /x/tard selected to make it look scary. If you go to the archive and look up any object across the whole sky you will get an nH map that looks pretty much the same.

There is no hope necessary, it is Saturn.

You can apparently see it from Earth

>attending dartmouth
>ever

Gonna need some source on that pixel pile, user.

Some user on /x/, which makes it dubious as fuck.
Personally I think it's some unrelated star cluster

please don't debunk I wanna believe the world will end

Nope. Somebody randomly posted that image on /x/ without giving a source or even claiming to know it was the same object. The moron who makes those threads then adopted as his own and cut out this crucial evidence. If it isn't verifiable or inscrutable it isn't science.

Thank you for clearing that up for me, science user.

I'm actually sort of impressed.