A coupla months back, Michael “Bongo” Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he’d been a-starin’ and a-studyin’ some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about ’em: they is all pointing in the same direction.
The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story but it now turns out Bongo Longo has now withdrawn the paper sayin’:
“This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to the discovery of a serious bias resulting from the systematic dimming of galaxies with larger ellipticities away from the North Galactic Pole. Thus the conclusion that there is a special axis along which the elliptical galaxies tend to be aligned is incorrect.”
Shame really. I know ya’ll wanted to know what they were pointing at.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.4013: The Axis of Opportunity: The Large-Scale Correlation of Elliptical Galaxies
(Thanks Tim, ‘ppreciate it)