Back a few month's ago, we had an article about Galaxy Zoo. In essence, it's a type of consortium that studies galaxies and works towards classifying them. In the process of studying the images, they made a rather unusual discovery… One that's still around. (...)Read the rest of Hanny's Voorwerp - Still Alive and [...]

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It keeps getting better - our team was approved for 7 orbits' worth of Hubble observations of Hanny's Voorwerp in the next cycle. Details at the Galaxy Zoo blog entry; more to follow as the observations get set up... In fact, more details on the original discovery and data are available here. This has been a marvelous bit of serendipity from the Galaxy Zoo project - things we would not have thought to look for. (For Anglophones - my admittedly mediocre Dutch pronunciation of this sounds sort of like four-vairp).

By the way, as far as I know, Joe Brimacombe's is the first amateur image to show the object.

Featured at APOD today. It sure IS "unusually green."

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.html

The current hypothesis:

B)

Or perhaps "The Incredible Hulk" got jettisoned out into space...

I prefer the blue one.

Are any of these "true color"?

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The green one is much closer to visual color, modulo the usual problem that it's way too dim for actual human color vision. The [O III] emission line is enormously strong, responsible all by itself for something like 75% of the light in either the g or V magnitude systems. So if high-ionization planetary nebulae are green, so is Hanny's Voorwerp. (At redshift z=0.05 its color hasn't changed much from zero redshift). That image was made from a g-band image, one in the i band which is almost free of even the weaker H-alpha emission, and a bluer narrowband image, rescaled for (roughly) the right galaxy color (which we can do because we have calibrated spectra for both the Voorwerp and the galaxy nucleus).

Which to me sounds pretty decent, provided that the 'v' is a very, very soft one. Do I understand correctly that the 7 orbit observation will be actually scheduled after the Hubble servicing mission? In the 'putting a time and date' to it sense?

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I feel a bit better after that pronunciation note - someone else said that was clearly the mark of spending too much time in Amsterdam, which I hadn't. Leiden, Amsterdam, the whole Randstad must be all the same I find it much harder to duplicate the way I hear the W in that part of the Netherlands.

Anyway - the detailed observing plans are due in this week for HST cycle 17 observations, which sort of by definition start following the orbital verification after SM4 (STS-125). (The Galaxy Zoo blog will have details on the specifics of our plan once this deadline is past). The visibility windows for IC 2497 and Hanny's Voorwerp run from December into almost May, so if all goes well with repairs and new instruments I'd expect to see the data next spring. Those caveats are important - we proposed observations with three instruments, of which one is still on the ground and two are in orbit but non-functional for electronic reasons.

Add to that 100,000 years the length of time the light has been travelling; about 700 million years. This 'voorwerp' is very distant in both time and space.

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The BBC have picked up on this now

They also have a picture of the teacher taking part in Galaxy Zoo who spotted it

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