For many years, Astronomers have thought that IC 1644 was a planetary nebula, however when Sir Rob Vanderson, US Astronomer Royal, recently observed IC 1644 from darkest Australia using a spectrograph through his 14˝" f/7 travel-scope, the resultant spectra was not that of a planetary nebula, but rather a single stellar spectra with no indication of any gaseous material whatsoever.
Further research has lead to the finding that what appears to be a planetary nebula is actually a star within the SMC whose light is being gravitationally-lensed around a black hole lying somewhere between the Milky Way and the SMC, and coincidentally right in the middle of our line of sight of this particular extra-galactic star.
The perfect circular appearance of the object, is due solely to the fact that the gravitationally-lensed star, the black hole and the Solar System's current position in the Milky Way, are all aligned in such a perfect manner, that the light from the star is evenly spread out in the form of a halo around the perimeter of the black hole.
This image shows variations consistent with parallax effects arising from the Earth's rotation about the Sun, and careful measurements demonstrate that the intervening black hole is remarkably close to our Solar System – a matter of only relatively few light years.
This close proximity, together with some as yet unidentified properties of the light from the distant star being precisely focussed at a fixed point on Earth have resulted in the surprising discovery that this point of focus is located precisely in the centre of the notorious Bermuda Triangle.
The Fort Davis field station of the University of Texas is working hard to ascertain whether the interaction between the obscured star, the light path of the star travelling around the black hole and the immense gravitational field of the black hole itself has induced the development of a gravitational string between the black hole and the famous Triangle.
There is serious speculation voiced by the more responsible British tabloid newspapers that the gravitationally attractive effects of such a string could actually pluck ships or aircraft out of the Bermuda Triangle and out to interstellar space.
Should such an effect be active, the question arises as to whether such objects are pulled to their destruction in the vacuum between the stars, or whether they make an instant passage to the black hole and are then flung somewhere else in space and/or time, considering that the laws of physics which apply in such immense gravitational fields are totally unknown.