Hubble telescope zeroes in on green blob in space (Hanny's 'Voorwerp', it's 'strangely alive')

Yahoo ^ | 1/10/11 | Seth Borenstein - AP

[NormsRevenge]

WASHINGTON – The Hubble Space Telescope got its first peek at a mysterious giant green blob in outer space and found that it's strangely alive.

The bizarre glowing blob is giving birth to new stars, some only a couple million years old, in remote areas of the universe where stars don't normally form.

[NormsRevenge]

Hubble Zooms in on a Space Oddity
Press Release - 10 January 2011

A strange, glowing green cloud of gas that has mystified astronomers since its discovery in 2007 has been studied by Hubble. The cloud of gas is lit up by the bright light of a nearby quasar, and shows signs of ongoing star formation.

One of the strangest space objects ever seen is being scrutinised by the penetrating vision of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. A mysterious, glowing green blob of gas is floating in space near a spiral galaxy. Hubble uncovered delicate filaments of gas and a pocket of young star clusters in the giant object, which is the size of the Milky Way.

The Hubble revelations are the latest finds in an ongoing probe of Hanny’s Voorwerp (Hanny’s Object in Dutch). It is named after Hanny van Arkel, the Dutch schoolteacher who discovered the ghostly structure in 2007 while participating in the online Galaxy Zoo project. Galaxy Zoo enlists the public to help classify more than a million galaxies catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has expanded to include Galaxy Zoo: Hubble, in which the public is asked to assess tens of thousands of galaxies in deep imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope.

In the sharpest view yet of Hanny’s Voorwerp, Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys have uncovered star birth in a region of the green object that faces the spiral galaxy IC 2497, located about 650 million light-years from Earth. Radio observations have shown an outflow of gas arising from the galaxy’s core. The new Hubble images reveal that the galaxy’s gas is interacting with a small region of Hanny’s Voorwerp, which is collapsing and forming stars. The youngest stars are a couple of million years old.

The greenish Voorwerp is visible because a searchlight beam of light from the galaxy’s core has illuminated it. This beam came from a quasar — a bright, energetic object that is powered by a black hole. The quasar is thought to have turned off less than 200 000 years ago.

Astronomer Bill Keel of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, USA, leader of the Hubble study, is presenting his results on this object today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, USA. Read more about his preliminary findings in the NASA news release linked below.

[Bean Counter]

Giant Galactic Fart-Bubble *ping*

[GeronL]

If the galaxy is causing it to collapse and form stars, then how did the stars form when there were no galaxies?

[freedumb2003]

Jim "Wash Out" Pfaffenbach: You've got six bogies heading toward you!
[sneezes on the radar screen]
Jim "Wash Out" Pfaffenbach: Oh my God, a dozen more of them! And a blimp, a big, shiny blimp and it's slowly moving south!

[Bean Counter]

I am not an astrophysicist, nor do I play one on TV. I also have not spent the night in a Holiday Inn Express lately either, so I am completely unqualified to answer your question....

I do think several cubic parsecs of Alka-Seltzer might do it some good though...

[Rebelbase]

A galactic loogie.

[AZLiberty]

Before there were galaxies, stars formed from clouds of gas collapsing due to gravity.

[fish hawk]

Swamp gas.

[GeronL]

gravity from what?

[ExGeeEye]

Beware of the Blob--
It creeps,
And leaps,
And glides,
And slides across the floor
Up to
Your door,
And all along the wall,
A splotch,
A blotch,
Be careful of the Blob.

The song still scares the crap out of my 12-year-old nephew, who steadfastly refuses to watch the film.

[OrioleFan]

If space is going green, I have a few candidates to send out to investigate it...

[NightOfTheLivingDems]

a quasar — a bright, energetic object that is powered by a black hole

That would be a good late-nite parody of how the MSM enamors BHO & wife.

[AZLiberty]

Gravitational attraction between the particles in the cloud. By randomness, particles will be distributed unevenly in the cloud from time to time. Occasionaly, the local density of particles will be such that the particles will coalesce into a lump, whose gravity will attract more particles. The process will cascade until there is so much mass in one place that the internal pressures are strong enough to produce fusion, lighting the star up.

Galaxy collisions accelerate this process by producing turbulence within the gas clouds between the stars, increasing the nonuniformity of gas distribution and increasing the likelihood of forming “lumps”.

[eastforker]

A question for all you space geeks out there.If a black hole’s gravity is so strong that light can not escape, would any other particles flowing into the black hole be traveling faster than the speed of light?

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

It looks like a jumping frog.

[GeronL]

lumps cause lumpectomies and wala.. Stars!

[Pilgrim's Progress]

I saw it, looks like godzirra, vely scaly. I so velly, velly Flightened.