Hacker News Reader

It does not seem very plausible that professional astronomers have twice made this rookie mistake and no-one has noticed yet. Furthermore, if they were just doing what amounts to drawing circles and lines on a map of galaxies, they could have discovered thousands by now!

View on HN

The rate at which we are collecting data far, far outpaces the speed at which it is being analyzed.

There will almost certainly be more discoveries like this as we continue surveying the cosmos with increasingly sensitive instruments.

Well, yes, but my point is that, if these astronomers are finding circles and other structures without doing basic checks such as distance, they could find thousands right now, using nothing more than a chart of the known galaxies - and even bigger ones than they are reporting here. Thus, it is not plausible that they are omitting these basic checks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com