The Universe is a Big Place

This is interesting:

Apparently astronomers have discovered an object in space. And apparently they don't know where it is, what it is, or where it went.

This thing showed up in February, 2006 in the constellation Bootes. (the Heardsman) It got progressively brighter over the next 100 days, growing to 120 times it's original brightness. Then over a similar amount of time, it grew dimmer, before finally simply disappearing.

Star of Bethlehem, anyone?

There is a rather verbose and techical paper written by some folks out at UC Berkeley that basically says "it came, we saw, it went, and we have no idea what it was, but we tried real hard to figure it out." Before you can say "supernova," it's not one. In fact, they have a whole list of things that it's not. They can tell from the color of the light and something called parallax that it's anywhere between 130 light years and 11 billion light years away. That's like saying something is somewhere in between your desk and Neptune. So whatever this thing was, it happened somewhere between just after the Big Bang and 1876.

Still think we can figure everything our on our own?

I'm not going to get into one of these "old-earth creation" vs. "new-earth creation" debates. But certainly, God is willing to throw us a curveball once in a while, just to keep us honest. It's rather humbling, I suppose, for these scientists to spend thousands of man-hours (and millions of bucks, I'd wager) to say "We have no idea." These guys should all read the Book of Job. I'd suggest starting in Chapter 38.

Or maybe it was just this....