Clues to the origin of this enormous cloud of gas have been maddeningly vague
With dozens of large telescopes scattered across Earth and some well above it, you might think we’ve pretty much discovered all there is to find in the sky. But this is, literally, too narrow a view.
Sainty was targeting the region around Andromeda, a large spiral galaxy much like our own Milky Way that’s just 2.5 million light-years away. Its proximity, cosmically speaking, has made it a juicy target for astronomers for more than a century. With its most obvious riches mapped, astronomers had generally assumed anything left to discover there would be small, individual objects inside the galaxy itself.
Wondering if it might be some sort of artifact in his images—reflected light in his telescope, for example—Sainty enlisted the help of two other amateur astronomers, Marcel Drechsler and Xavier Strottner, both of whom have extensive experience with observing faint nebulae. After analyzing the data, they asked another accomplished amateur astronomer, Bray Falls, to make more observations with his own telescope. He saw the same nebula in his data, independently confirming the cloud’s existence.
If it resides in Andromeda’s enormous halo—a roughly spherical collection of stars surrounding the galaxy—it could be gas flung off by streams of stars there. But if so, there should be copious hydrogen seen as well because that’s the major component of stars. Yet, as Sainty showed with his hydrogen-detecting filter, the cloud has none—or at least too little to detect.
It’s possible SDSO-1 could be the remnant of a Milky Way star that exploded as a supernova, but then it should also be glowing in ultraviolet light and radio waves. Searching older observations of Andromeda, however, astronomers see nothing coming from the cloud at any other wavelengths, including x-rays and visible and infrared light.
Also, the cloud is extremely faint, requiring very long exposures to spot at all. The total observation time in the discovery and confirmation images that used just the doubly ionized oxygen filter was a staggering 160 hours. Even the filters and detectors used in professional observatories are designed to observe in a different way than amateur telescopes. This also amplifies the difficulty of finding objects like SDSO-1. Even the 3.
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