
Hubble image of...what, exactly?
When the Hubble Telescope took follow-up photographs of an object detected by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research sky survey, it captured images of the remarkable X-pattern near the nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. Astronomers speculate this is the product of a head-on collision by two asteroids.
One fan demurs. Bjo Trimble e-mailed friends, “Don’t they see this is an alien spaceship? For pitysake! Every Sci-fi reader/watcher would recognize it!”
If you go to the large image (Link to pic at hubblesite.org), it certainly appears to be too unusual a shape to be an asteroid. It appears to meet the literal definition of UFO (as Mercury 7 astronaut Scott Carpenter put it: “UFOs exist. Flying saucers do not”)