Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
Re:Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice troll. Really.
But, to play purely devil's advocate -- if there truly was a creator-being, it would encompass all that is science, and wouldn't require the Earth to be only 6000 years old.
That creator would fall into the realm of completely unknowable -- it would be outside of what we understand of the universe, and capable of understanding and manipulating things we still can't fathom. I'm not sure the human brain could wrap itself around what that would really imply since it would be such a vastly complex and advanced thing as to be beyond our ability to perceive and understand.
When you get to questions about "what existed before the big bang" or "what happens after we die" or the other really meta stuff, you are outside of what science can comment on. Morality, for example, isn't really in the realm of science.
While not personally religious, I've known people with degrees in astrophysics who were quite religious, and had absolutely no conflict between the science and their concept of god. However, being Really Fucking Smart People with an understanding of the science ... their concept of god was correspondingly much bigger, and encompassed a whole lot more. God didn't need to be stepping into fiddle with the bits science wasn't clear on, and science didn't intrude on the bits that God was in control of. For them, there existed no dichotomy between god and science.
My notion is that if your religion can include all applicable science, it's not harming anybody, and is probably a good thing overall. It's only when the religion needs to deny the science to prop up its own viewpoints that it starts to break down. At a certain level, they do (and should) cover non-intersecting areas of endeavor.
Religion isn't bad per se, it's bad when it wants to override reality and is inflexible/oblivious to the world around it.
Well, yeah, that too ... :-P
Astounding? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it really astounding? I thought astronomers see things they've never seen before all the time.
Re:Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
If we can't know 'god', fine, the problem is most religious people think that they know god, know what 'he' wants, and feel that they are justified above any structure of society whether that is law, culture, or common morality (genocide is bad, except when GOD does it or people are commanded by him to do it!) to act on 'his' imperatives as they conceive them to be.
Deism is harmless. Theism is a deadly evil.
Re:Um (Score:5, Insightful)
Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) ...
explains why Voorwerps are so rare
I would have to disagree... "objects" are quite common.
And I counter-disagree. Objects are quite rare compared to vacuum. They're just easy to spot because there's nothing between most of them except photons.
Re:Voorwerpen (Score:3, Insightful)
In Dutch, I'm sure that's true, but if this word were to enter English as a term meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", then it might well follow English rules of pluralization, as so many borrowed words do (e.g. "ninjas" or "octopuses"[*]).
The real problem is that the stupid summary treats "voorwerp" as if it really were already adopted into English with the given meaning. The statement "Voorwerps are so rare" is simply false, because voorwerp means object, and objects are not rare.
[*] And no, "octopi", while also an acceptable pluralization in English is not a counterexample, because it uses pluralization rules of a different language (Greek v. Latin), which is a distinctly English sort of thing to do.