Astronomy

While using the www.galaxyzoo.org website to classify images of galaxies, Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch school teacher, and volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project, found this object on the archived images of the night sky. Soon after she posted about the image, it became known as “Hanny’s Voorwerp” (Dutch for “object”) on the Galaxy Zoo forum. Astronomers who run the site began to investigate and soon realized van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object.

Scientists working at telescopes around the world and with satellites in space were asked to take a look at the mysterious Voorwerp. The mystery thing is that object didn’t contain any stars. Rather, it was made entirely of gas so hot — about 10,000 Celsius — that the astronomers felt it had to be illuminated by something powerful. They will soon use the Hubble Space Telescope to get a closer look.

Since there was no obvious source at hand in the Voorwerp itself, scientist looked to find the source of illumination around the Voorwerp, and soon turned to the nearby galaxy IC 2497. It is thought that in the recent past the galaxy IC 2497 hosted an enormously bright quasar, a very unusual, highly luminous objects, powered by supermassive black holes, and most are extremely distant. Because of the vast scale of the galaxy and the Voorwerp, light from that past still lights up the nearby Voorwerp even though the quasar shut down sometime in the past 100,000 years, and the galaxy’s black hole itself has gone quiet. From the point of view of the Voorwerp, the galaxy looks as bright as it would have before the black hole turned off – it’s this light echo that has been frozen in time for us to observe!

(Picture credits: Dan Smith, Peter Herbert, Matt Jarvis / ING)

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