Hanny’s Voorwerp
This is a great story.
Imagine you’re spending some time on the Galaxy Zoo website — "the project that harnesses the power of the internet and your brain," as the slogan goes "to classify a million galaxies" — and in the image of a remote galaxy that literally no one has ever looked at you find something: different. Something that doesn’t match the classification guidelines given to volunteers on the website.
What would you do?
You’d probably put up a post in the Galaxy Zoo forums asking other users for help identifying the object, correct? And maybe email the webmaster?
That’s exactly what Dutch schoolteacher Hanny Van Arkel did when she discovered a green blob in an image that she was classifying on the Galaxy Zoo website. What happened next is incredible.
A new class of cosmic object has been found by a Dutch schoolteacher, through a project which allows the public to take part in astronomy research online.
Hanny Van Arkel, 25, came across the strange gaseous blob while using the Galaxy Zoo website to help classify galaxies in telescope images.
Astronomers subsequently confirmed that the object was one-of-a-kind.
The work has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The object quickly became known as "Hanny’s Voorwerp" – Voorwerp being the Dutch word for "object".
Researchers think this green blob got its energy from light emitted by a quasar (a powerful radiation source powered by a supermassive black hole) that has since gone dim.
They think the quasar was hosted in a nearby spiral galaxy called IC 2497. It was so bright that, if the quasar was still active, it would be visible from Earth with binoculars.
However, because of the distance between the galaxy and the Voorwerp, light from the quasar would have taken tens of thousands of years to reach the gaseous blob…
Dr Lintott said the object was the only one of its type known to astronomers, though other Voorwerpen could still be awaiting identification.
He added that the object had been catalogued before, but its significance had only been recognised when it was brought to the attention of Galaxy Zoo team members by Ms Van Arkel.
During the last year, 50 million classifications of galaxies have been submitted on one million objects at galaxyzoo.org by more than 150,000 amateur astronomers from all over the world.
The next stage of the project will ask volunteers for more detailed classifications, making it easier to identify more unusual objects such as Hanny’s Voorwerp, according to the BBC report.
