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:4, Interesting)
Religion isn't bad per se, it's bad when it wants to override reality and is inflexible/oblivious to the world around it.
But who gets to decide? Buddhism: good, Christianity: bad. I can see some fundamental First Amendment problems here. So lets just keep them all out of the classroom, courtroom, and laboratory. Or make me the Grand Inquisitor and I'll deal with the heretics.
You look like a voorwerp! (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically, "voorwerp" is simply a dutch word meaning "object", so, while you could say that "looks like a voorwerp," technically, so does this car [wikipedia.org], or this shell [wikipedia.org].
Of course, it is possible that "voorwerp" will now enter the English language as a word meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", but let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? :)
Re:Science! (Score:0, Interesting)
"deism is harmless. theism is deadly"
no.
people are deadly.
scientists generally lead comfortable lives. if you turned everyone into a scientists the world over, with the snap of your fingers, all 7 billion of us, then the playing field would be level, and that comfortable life goes away.
then you get to see 7 billion scientists behave much in the same manner that the rest of humanity has.