In a scenario that sounds like the opening for a “Zombies From Outer Space” movie, the European Space Agency released a photo of a never-before-seen star that was formed when two dead white dwarf stars collided – but instead of destroying each other, the white dwarfs merged into a new kind of zombie star that’s not really alive but still emitting a very bright X-ray light that’s expected to last a brief (in star time) 10,000 years before a ship can arrive and blow the zombie star’s brains out and chase down any zombie space ships it had launched.

Just kidding … it will last until the zombie star collapses into itself, forming a neutron star. Throw those zombie spaceships and the brain-blowing mission back in – is it plot-worthy?

“Recently, a WD merger product, IRAS 00500+6713, was identified. IRAS 00500+6713 consists of a central star embedded in a circular nebula. The analysis of the optical spectrum of the central star revealed that it is hot, hydrogen, and helium free, and it drives an extremely fast wind with a record breaking speed.”

From the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics comes that astronomer-speak analysis of an event that was first discovered in the constellation Cassiopeia (if you think that would be a good name for a band, it’s already taken (minus one ‘s’)) by researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany and the Russian Academy of Sciences using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. Lacking both hydrogen and helium, two elements found in white dwarfs, the astronomers speculated that J005311 was something never seen before – the product of a white dwarf collision that became reanimated and started burning again. But how?

“Low-resolution X-ray spectra reveal large neon, magnesium, silicon, and sulfur enrichment of the central star and the nebula. We conclude that IRAS 00500+6713 resulted from a merger of an ONe and a CO WD, which supports earlier suggestion for a super-Chandrasekhar mass of this object. X-ray analysis indicates that the merger was associated with an episode of carbon burning and possibly accompanied by an SN Iax.”

Unfortunately, Google Translate doesn’t work on astronomer-speak. The study reveals that astrophysicist Lidia Oskinova of the University of Potsdam led a team using the ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope to look at both J005311 and the nebula surrounding it — IRAS 00500+6713. What they determined was that the colliding white dwarfs (that band name isn’t used yet) were distinct – one was primarily oxygen and neon (ONe) while the other was carbon monoxide (CO). The neon explains why the zombie star (photo here) glows green.

“Such an event is extremely rare. There are probably not even half a dozen such objects in the Milky Way, and we have discovered one of them.”

Dr. Götz Gräfener from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy (AIfA) at the University of Bonn explains in the press release what a big deal this zombie star is. Unfortunately, its zombie lifespan is brief. J005311 will turn its elements into iron in just a few thousand years, fading away its glow. It will then collapse under its own gravity while its former electrons and protons fuse into neutrons. The end result will be an incredibly dense neutron star measuring only few kilometers in diameter. However, like all zombies, it will go out with a bang – in this case, a supernova explosion.

A movie-worthy ending for a unique zombie star. Throw in a parting shot of a small object emerging from the explosion and we’ve got the potential for a sequel.

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Fans of Isaac Asimov will recognize his Three Laws of Robotics, first presented in his 1942 short story “Runaround” and popularized in the 1950 collection “I, Robot.” While they’re generally recognized as rules for robot interactions with humans, the third could apply to robot-to-robot encounters as well. Although “protect” implies aggression or physical contact, it could also pertain to ‘intelligent’ contact. But what about one robot attacking another emotionally, as humans do to each other so frequently? We may soon find out as a new robot developed at Columbia University has learned to predict another robot’s future actions in a way that some are calling “empathy.” Would today’s version of “I, Robot” need to be changed to “I Feel Your Pain, Robot”?

“Our initial results are very exciting. Our findings begin to demonstrate how robots can see the world from another robot’s perspective.”

Are you OK?

Or from in another robot’s steel shoes? That description of robot empathy comes from Boyuan Chen in a Columbia University press release describing his new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports. He and co-authors Carl Vondrick and Hod Lipson built a small robot and programmed it to seek and move towards any green circle it could see in a cage or simulated room it was placed in. Sometimes the robot had a clear view; other times it was blocked by a red box and forced to move around to look for it or another circle. A second robot was placed in a position to observe the actions of the first and predict its moves. After two hours, the observing robot, with just a few visual frames of viewing, was able to predict which green circle the other would pick and the path it would take.

“The ability of the observer to put itself in its partner’s shoes, so to speak, and understand, without being guided, whether its partner could or could not see the green circle from its vantage point, is perhaps a primitive form of empathy.”

Is there anything I can do?

If you’re worried about robots becoming empathetic to other robots, it gets scarier. The authors suggest this is an early step down the path of robots acquiring a “Theory of Mind” where, like human toddlers, they first understand the needs and perspectives of other robots, then develop social interactions as playful and cooperative as hide-and-seek and other games, or as sinister (and human-like) as lying and deception. Ultimately, Hod Lipson predicts robots could develop a “mind’s eye” allowing them to think visually like humans. He doesn’t necessarily see this a good thing.

“We recognize that robots aren’t going to remain passive instruction-following machines for long. Like other forms of advanced AI, we hope that policymakers can help keep this kind of technology in check, so that we can all benefit.”

Unfortunately, we can’t ask Isaac Asimov for Three More Laws of Robotics for Robots. Then again, if robots are capable of becoming emotional, will three be enough?

The list of strange UFO cases is long, and one doesn’t have to look far to find one that raises eyebrows and incites debate. Some of these have toed the line between possible real event and hoax, often falling on neither side and spurring many questions and much discussion. One such case comes to us from the wilds of Canada, involving a strange UFO sighting, a possible crash, and a mysterious package sent by an unknown party containing things that continue to be debated and discussed.

The whole bizarre story starts on August 18, 1991, in the small, rural historic township of West Carleton, Ontario, in Canada, where on this evening a housewife by the name of Diane Labenek was relaxing at her home on an otherwise rather uneventful night. However, at some point her dogs outside began to go nuts, after which she got up to go look outside. That was when she saw what she would describe as red flames and smoke belching up from a nearby field. It was a very bizarre sight to see, but it would get even stranger when she saw an outlandish unidentified object in the sky looming over it all, and she would say of it:

I looked out the window and I saw flames out on the field, extremely red flames and lots of smoke. It didn’t look like a fire. I know what a fire looks like when you start a fire out there when the grass is very dry. If you start a fire, you will see it moving either this way, or closer to the woods. And the fire was on one spot only. I saw a ship coming down close to the flames. Right on top of the ship, I saw a blue flashing light and another light was on the bottom, very bright. I didn’t know what to do. I was looking at it for about 10 minutes or so. And then the ship went a little bit back over the trees and it disappeared and I saw all the flames turn out at the same time. I don’t think I’d like to see it again. It’s very scary. I’ve lived here for many, many years and I have never been so scared in my life.

After the anomalous craft disappeared, she says that not 10 minutes later a helicopter flew over the area, which fully buzzed her home and crisscrossed the location before disappearing into the night. The next day, Diane went out to survey the scene, but could find no evidence of a fire or anything at all really. She began to doubt if she had seen what she thought she had, but nevertheless told her mother and husband about what she had seen. After that she kept it all to herself, even though she claimed that there were often frequent black-, green- or maroon-colored helicopters lurking about the area, which the military would deny having ever been there, but it would appear that this was far from the end of the story.

Six months would pass, and then, in February of 1992, UFO researcher Bob Oechsler and some other ufologists received rather odd packages in the mail from Canada. The packages all contained alleged secret military documents, pictures, a map, and a VHS videotape, labeled “Guardian,” with all of them marked by a thumbprint and claiming to show the very same object that Diane Labenek had seen. The video footage was taken at night, and appeared to show a bright flying object with a blue flashing strobe approach a clump of bright flames on the ground. This tape would soon make it out into the wild, where it was shown on several high-profile news shows and TV shows, including Unsolved Mysteries, which propelled it into the public consciousness, and in the meantime the researchers who had received this were trying to figure out what was going on.

Still from the Guardian UFO footage

The map included in the package was of West Carleton, so Oechsler headed there along with fellow ufologist Graham Lightfoot, where they talked with Diane and came to the conclusion that what she had seen and what was in the video were likely one in the same. As this was going on, the video was sent to be analyzed by Navy physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who came to the conclusion that, while blurry and indistinct, showed something that could not be easily explained. He would say of this:

It’s one of the clearest videos I’ve seen that shows a structured object. There’s the beacon light, blue light evidently, reflecting down on the body of the craft, the outline of the object itself. You can see some sort of dark lines that appear, some brightness structure, indicating something generating light is hanging down below the object. It’s generating green light as well as blue light. The section of the video which shows the object as sort of appearing over a rise is quite convincing to me as what you would expect if somebody were in the field trying to get closer to it and not knowing how close he could get. And so he turns on his camera while he’s walking. He knows he’s going to come up over a rise and see it and you can see in the video he moves further and further down until you see the whole device.

Suddenly, the light coming towards him gets brighter and brighter and you get a great big diffuse reflection or image in the camera, which suggests to me that this object shined a beam, a blue beam right at him. It appeared to be so large that it would not be logical to try to set all this up at night, under darkness. There would’ve been evidence during the day of movement of generators, of somebody hauling cables, maybe a big apparatus or something that they would’ve had to bring in there for that night. Clearly, if there was a hoax involved, Diane would’ve seen evidence of it in advance.

He also pointed out that the video features in the background the sound of dogs barking, presumed to be those of Oechsler. Another person who analyzed the footage was Dr. Robert Nathan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who reviewed it in a non-official capacity and could not adequately explain what was seen in the video. It was all very exciting, but there were some red flags as well. For one, the mysterious informant “Guardian” had provided documents that not only ranted about UFOs, Red China, and nuclear weapons, but also did not seem to be very official, with multiple errors throughout suggesting that they were forged. Bob Oechsler would say of this:

There’s some question, immediately, with regard to the authenticity of the documentation, that it didn’t look like it was a typical government document. This document is clearly a fabrication. There are way too many errors in the document to make it authentic. Someone with very little effort could have come a lot closer than this.

Not helping the credibility of the footage was that it at one point shows what seem to be alien creatures, which looked decidedly fake and cast it all in a suspicious light. In light of all of this, the Guardian footage was soon being dismissed as a hoax, although it was unclear who Guardian actually was. One idea was that it was being orchestrated by a man named Bobby Charlebois, who just happened to be a UFO nut and who also knew Diane, and making it even more suspicious was that he refused to have his fingerprints taken. This has thrown certain doubt over it all, but Diane Labenek  has always insisted that her sighting was real and here are those willing to defend the Guardian footage. For his part, Bob Oechsler has taken a skeptical, yet hopeful view on it all, saying:

This is either an extraordinary top secret flying vehicle of somebody’s government or it is of a non-human origin. Having no contact with Guardian is probably the biggest frustration to an investigation like this. We don’t know who Guardian is, what Guardian represents. We don’t know if Guardian was sent or went on his own. We have no idea what the solution to many of these mysteries are going to be. We may never know.

In recent years, Toronto filmmaker Nick Crowe has been endeavoring to make a documentary on the whole thing, entitled Searching for Guardian. Crowe has taken the approach of looking at the case as a possible hoax, and why anyone would want to carry out such a thing. He has said of his efforts and philosophy on the project:

I guess what we’re most interested in is the idea and belief in UFOs. Whatever happened took on an incredible life of its own. It’s not going to be an Unsolved Mystery type of story. These documentaries tend to be human interest stories. There’s definitely a human angle to this. If it was a hoax, why? Someone took a lot of care putting these video tape packages together. There’s an interesting angle there. There was an RCMP investigation; the low-flying helicopters; the Guardian element. We’re the kind of company that does everything by the book. We’re not trying to create a gotcha moment. We’re not salacious. Our interest is not to harass people to be in the film. I would like to believe but I have skepticism about it. Alien landings are kind of a central mystery. This struck me as having a lot of interesting characters around it. A lot of time and effort and thought went in to it.

So what are we dealing with here? Was this a hoax or something else? What did Diane see and who was the mysterious Guardian? It has mostly been written off as a very clever hoax, but it has also never really been fully resolved. Whatever we are looking at here seems to be evading any concrete understanding, and whether it is a trick or not, we may never know just what is going on, or if it is a hoax who orchestrated it all. One more mystery among many in the UFO field.