The reason for the excitement concerning V838 has to do with the fact that it has appeared—and flaunted itself—in such an unconventional manner. For instance, the star’s magnificent eruption suddenly increased its brightness by a factor of 10,000. Researchers exclaimed, “V838 Mon at its maximum brightness was temporarily the brightest star in the Milky Way” (422:405). Furthermore, it had increased in size, so that if it were placed within our solar system, the star would engulf everything within (and even including) the orbit of Jupiter. The rapid expansion and sudden increase in luminosity were slightly reminiscent of novae or supernovae explosions. However, as scientists have documented, it failed to exhibit the necessary characteristics to be considered as either option. First, novae-type explosions are cataclysmic events involving the ejection of massive amounts of material, but V838’s outbursts showed tremendous ejection of its outer layers, and only small amounts of circumstellar dust have been found. Second, it lacked the subsequent gravitational core collapse, which produces a central region of extreme density, sometimes seen in the form of a white dwarf star, neutron star, or black hole. Third, rather than have the seething expulsion of matter associated with the nebular stage in a classical novae-type eruption, the temperature within the star actually dropped from around 6000 to 2000 Kelvin, and the outermost part of the shell is now probably somewhere around 800 Kelvin. Using the Broadband Array Spectrograph System (BASS) and the Near Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (NIRIS), The Aerospace Corporation performed a deeper look into the interior of the star. They observed that the molecular content within the star had some very unusual features. Physicist Catherine C. Venturini noted: “There were molecular features everywhere: water (H₂O), carbon monoxide (CO), hydroxyl radical (OH), hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) and mercapto radical (SH), and aluminum oxide (AlO)” (see “The Strangest Star…,” 2003). V838 has been marked “as different from any known category of stellar outburst” (see “Strange Outburst,” 2003), and Munari and colleagues proposed that this star could be the manifestation of a “new class of astronomical objects” (2002, 389:L56). In their paper, published in Nature, Bond and his colleagues noted that “these characteristics indicate that V838 Mon represents a hitherto unknown type of stellar outburst, for which we have no completely satisfactory physical explanation” (422:405).