“It’s worthwhile to not just do what was done 60 years ago, but also to keep an eye out for very unusual things,” says SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak. “The universe has been around for three times as long as the Earth has been around, so there could be aliens out there that are very, very much more advanced than we are—not just 1,000 years, but millions and billions of years ahead.”
It’s been said that the discovery of cosmic anomalies don’t begin with ‘eureka!’; they begin with “that’s funny…” In 1960 a Polish-Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski using a telescope to study fast-moving stars in southern skies said “no star should look like that,” when he made an amazing discovery that came to be known as “Przybylski’s Star” –a mysterious object located some 370 light years away from the Earth now known as HD 101065, in the constellation of Centaurus with a unworldly, exotic chemical composition, that takes almost 200 years to fully rotate on its axis.
Przybylski’s enigma is a variable star whose spectrum shows it laced with bizarre elements like europium, gadolinium, terbium and holmium, iron and nickel in unusually low abundances, and short-lived ultra-heavy elements, actinides like actinium, plutonium, americium and einsteinium that should not be able to persist in the atmosphere of a star that out Przybylski’s Star in the Ap class of chemically peculiar stars.
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