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Amateur astronomer spies gassy "cosmic ghost" ("Hanny's Voorwerp")
Reuters on Yahoo ^
| 8/10/08
| Reuters
Posted on 08/05/2008 7:29:54 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a "cosmic ghost," a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object.
The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online.
"At first, we had no idea what it was. It could have been in our solar system, or at the edge of the universe," Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski, a member and co-founder of the Galaxy Zoo team, said in a statement.
The find, nicknamed "Hanny's Voorwerp" (Dutch for object), soon had scientists training their telescopes on the object.
"What we saw was really a mystery," Schawinski said. "The Voorwerp didn't contain any stars."
Made entirely of very hot gas, the eerie green object is illuminated by remnant light from the nearby galaxy IC 2497.
"We think that in the recent past the galaxy IC 2497 hosted an enormously bright quasar," Schawinski said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
TOPICS: Astronomy; Science
KEYWORDS: astronomer; catastrophism; cosmicghost; gassy; haltonarp; spies; xplanets
'Hanny's Voorwerp', a green blob of gas (center] believed to be a 'light echo' from the bright, stormy centre of a distant galaxy that has now gone dim, in an undated image. (Dan Smith, Peter Herbert, Matt Jarvis and the ING/Handout/Reuters)
2
posted on
08/05/2008 7:30:47 PM PDT
by
NormsRevenge
(Semper Fi ... Godspeed ... ICE toll-free tip hotline 1-866-DHS-2-ICE ... 9/11 .. Never FoRget!!!)
To: NormsRevenge
Ghostbusters!
To: NormsRevenge
Looks like Kermit the Frog.
4
posted on
08/05/2008 7:41:02 PM PDT
by
Brilliant
To: NormsRevenge
5
posted on
08/05/2008 8:00:53 PM PDT
by
SunTzuWu
To: NormsRevenge
“Voorwerp”?
‘Round here, we call ‘em farts.
6
posted on
08/05/2008 8:04:13 PM PDT
by
exit82
(People get the government they deserve--and they are about to get it --in spades.)
To: SunTzuWu
7
posted on
08/05/2008 8:06:32 PM PDT
by
NormsRevenge
(Semper Fi ... Godspeed ... ICE toll-free tip hotline 1-866-DHS-2-ICE ... 9/11 .. Never FoRget!!!)
To: Brilliant
You’re right. It does look like Kermit.
8
posted on
08/05/2008 8:18:52 PM PDT
by
Kirkwood
To: Brilliant
Slimer lives. Kermit rules!
To: MadMax, the Grinning Reaper
It’s not easy being green!
To: NormsRevenge; All
One seemingly reliable source estimates that this mysterious object is ~700 million light years away, where one light year, the distance light travels in one year at its constant speed of 186,000 per second, is roughly 6 TRILLION miles. So 700 million light years is 700 million x 6 trillion...MILES. And the light we are seeing now was emitted 700 million years ago! At that time on Earth, geologists say, a huge super continent called Rodinia was still in the process of splitting apart. For those of you who live near the New Madrid Fault, you can thank this event for creating it.
Rodinia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodinia
11
posted on
08/05/2008 8:33:25 PM PDT
by
ETL
(Plenty of REAL smoking-gun evidence on the demonRats at: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
To: NormsRevenge
To: 75thOVI; aimhigh; Alice in Wonderland; AndrewC; aristotleman; Avoiding_Sulla; BenLurkin; Berosus; ..
Off-topic: I'm really sick of that "Obama - The One!" video that pops up. Really sick of it.
13
posted on
08/06/2008 9:44:11 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______Profile hasn't been updated since Friday, May 30, 2008)
To: KevinDavis; annie laurie; garbageseeker; Knitting A Conundrum; Viking2002; Ernest_at_the_Beach; ...
14
posted on
08/06/2008 9:44:36 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______Profile hasn't been updated since Friday, May 30, 2008)
To: KevinDavis
Ping if you haven’t already seen this.
15
posted on
08/06/2008 4:50:06 PM PDT
by
wastedyears
(Show me your precious darlings, and I will crush them all)
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