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Galaxy Zoo Produces a Rare Specimen
Posted by
kdawson
on Sunday June 22, @02:33PM
from the hanny's-voorwerp dept.
from the hanny's-voorwerp dept.
We discussed the Galaxy Zoo project soon after it launched last summer. Science News is now following developments about an odd celestial object
that is fueling a lot of excitement among astronomers around the world. In August, a Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny, in the process of characterizing galaxy images, noticed a peculiar object and posted a query about it on the Galaxy Zoo blog. She called it a "Voorwerp," which Science News says is Dutch for "thing" but which Google translates as "subject." Hanny's Voorwerp emits mostly green light (the earlier report said blue). The best guess astronomers have now is that the Voorwerp is emitting "ghost light," i.e. it is "lit by the ultraviolet light and X-rays from a quasar that has vanished in the last 100,000 years," to quote astronomer Bill Keel. "As far as we can tell, it's an unprecedented thing," Keel added. Researchers are scrambling to book time on the Hubble and other major telescopes to get a closer look.
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Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles 136 comments
hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it's more addictive than Tetris. From the site: "GalaxyZoo... harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you."
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image in the post? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:image in the post? (Score:5, Funny)
Do you mean Borg Gates isn't good enough for you?
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Re:image in the post? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking exactly the same thing.
I've been reading this site since 2000 and I can't recall *ever* seeing an image on the front page, I don't even think there was one for that monster thread about 9/11 as it unfolded...
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Re:image in the post? (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't a hotlink:
http://images.slashdot.org/articles/08/06/voorwerp-wht1.jpg [slashdot.org]
An image hosted on your server and placed inside an anchor tag is called a 'link'. Putting an image hosted on another server inside an image tag is a 'hotlink'.
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Voorwerp = Thing (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Voorwerp = Thing (Score:5, Informative)
"Item" is a better translation of "voorwerp". "Subject" would be "onderwerp".
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Re:Voorwerp = Thing (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, "object" is an even better translation of "voorwerp".
And it makes better sense in context too: "astronomers find mystery object" sounds find. "Astronomers find mystery thing" sounds stilted.
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Re:Voorwerp = Thing (Score:5, Informative)
"Object" would be the most accurate translation, taking into account the subject matter.
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Not always a 1:1 translation (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in South Africa, speaking mainly English, but also Afrikaans (a derivative of Dutch) and Zulu. My father and I would often mix all three in one sentence to get the words we wanted.
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Hey.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It is an Excession.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Voorwerp? (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't know that was a word.
That was the sound I made last time I threw up.
Whodathunkit.
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Re:Voorwerp? (Score:5, Informative)
Voorwerp is actually an odd word now that I really think about it. It is both generic, which is why it can be properly translated as "thing", and specific, in that it implies a purpose in the item it refers to (the exact purpose to be determined by the context it is used in). It can be translated as tool, thing, object, or item depending on the context it is used in.
Example uses of voorwerp, which all have different translations:
lijdend voorwerp - object (in grammar) [wikipedia.org]
meewerkend voorwerp - dative case [wikipedia.org]
gevonden voorwerpen - lost & found [wikipedia.org] (typically referring both to the items and the booth/office to reclaim them)
onbekend vliegend voorwerp - unidentified flying object [wikipedia.org]
Regarding the context of TFA, there is a very subtle implication which gets lost in whatever translation you may attempt: voorwerp implies a solid (crafted) object, which is why "thing" is the best translation in this case. It is very odd to refer to a celestial cloud as a solid item, and it says a lot about the peculiarity of the voorwerp...
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Re:Voorwerp? (Score:5, Funny)
Mind if I go off-topic for a moment, since there is an expert in the room? No, good.
Several years ago, when I was in France, I took a group of children to racing stables where they bred racing horses - a stud farm. While we were walking around, we met a charming, well-spoken Dutch couple in their 60s who chatted about this and that, and then indicating the breeding stables asked "So, tell me - do you have fuckeries like this England?" At least that's what I'm 90% sure they said.
I presume that "fuck" exists in the Dutch language and that their on-the-fly translation attempt misfired?
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Re:Voorwerp? (Score:5, Informative)
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Green, Blue? (Score:5, Interesting)
How far away is this 'thing' and what sort of red shift should we be factoring into its true color?
Once that has been answerd, what sorts of atoms would emit that wavelength when excited by a radiation source?
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Re:Green, Blue? (Score:5, Informative)
for the first part, ... z = 6.96.", and if i interpret the formulas there correctly, emittedWavelength = observedWavelength / (z + 1), so if this thing has the maximum known redshift and the observed wavelength is say 550nm, then the emitted wavelength would be about 70nm or 7e-6cm, so pretty well in the UV [sciencebuddies.org].
according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], "the highest confirmed spectroscopic redshift of a galaxy is
for the second part, atoms emit across a wide range of wavelengths [gsu.edu].
so it's more a matter of how much energy is driving the emission.
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Re:Green, Blue? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a redshift of 0.05 - six or seven hundred million light years away. We also have spectra of the voorwerp, so we know something about the atoms that make it up. You'll see some of these spectra at http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/03/20/voorwerp-fever/ with the elements emitting the lines labelled.
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The Vorrwerp Story (Score:5, Informative)
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To answer, "Why the rush?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Folks ask, "Why the rush?" to get time on the Hubble and other instruments.
Simply put, astronomical events can be extremely short lived. Yes, it happened millions of years ago. And it could continue for millions of years. But just as it appeared, it could go out.
Think what happens to novas and super novas. They blink into existence and then disappear. The same could happen here. Having never seen this class of voorwerp (object, thing, etc.), it is possible it could go out tomorrow or change dramatically in way which would make baseline data of the current status incredibly valuable.
Going a bit off topic here, I have to say it is totally cool to see a reference to my old friend and fellow Geek, Bill Keel here on Slashdot.
Bill and I attended UC Santa Cruz in the 1980s. I entered as a Freshman while Bill was finishing up his Phd in Astronomy (by the way, UC Santa has the top graduate program in Astronomy).
Even then he was the galaxy nerd and his dissertation was on the topic of, if I remember correctly, formation of spiral galaxies. I remember helping him with nroff and troff as he put his dissertation together.
During his Post-Doc years, he would come back frequently to perform observations at Lick Observatory (above San Jose) and to crunch data using a program written in Forth that ran on a handful of systems in the world (one of which was at UCSC).
Our friendship continued over the years (I was even one of his groomsmen).
Bill is a passionate teacher and researcher. He is very supportive of amateur astronomy (one of the few fields left where a non-professional, non-academic can have a major impact).
If you want to learn more about galaxies, check out one of his many web pages here: http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/ [ua.edu].
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Re:What's the rush? (Score:5, Insightful)
To beat the other astronomers.
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Re:What's the rush? (Score:5, Funny)
To beat the other astronomers.
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Re:What's the rush? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Green vs. Blue (Score:5, Informative)
No.
Its because those pics only use 3 of the 5 colour channels.
As there are no R/G/B sensors, everything is an approximation.
Some of the early ones looked blue, even though green would be a better optical equivalent (most likely because they weighted some near UV radiation as blue)
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Re:Obviously An Ad For... (Score:5, Funny)
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