No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author. But on landing they found that the replication was an illusion. The planet was a bare and lifeless ball of rock upon which ghostlike images of white clouds and grassy plains and blue oceans were somehow being projected, to give the illusion of the Earth as it was many thousands of years ago. The resolution of the mystery came when it was realized that there was a large warp is space exactly half way between Earth and this ghost planet. That, of course, was only science fiction.
Astrophysics is a spectator science.
The practitioner cannot go to his laboratory and do astrophysics experiments. He can only sit as a groundling in a vast audience, watching the show that Nature has staged in the heavens. Fortunately that show is sufficiently rich and varied that the scientific cycle of making hypotheses and testing them moves as rapidly in astrophysics as in sciences where laboratory experiments are possible. This discovery caused great excitement in the astrophysics community. In the science press the arcs were heralded as the largest and most mysterious objects in the universe, millions of light years in length and of no known origin, a new phenomenon begging for explanation.