Galaxy Zoo Produces a Rare Specimen

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.

Comments

image in the post?

[anotherone]

this is the first time I've ever seen slashdot put an image in the post- welcome to 2001, guys!

Re:image in the post?

[digidave]

Do you mean Borg Gates isn't good enough for you?

Re:image in the post?

[sycotic]

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...

Re:image in the post?

[maxume]

It isn't a hotlink:

http://images.slashdot.org/articles/08/06/voorwerp-wht1.jpg

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'.

Voorwerp = Thing

[Skinkie]

Voorwerp is 'thing' in Dutch. But when you would like to say 'thing' in Dutch, you would obviously use 'ding'.

Re:Voorwerp = Thing

[Basje]

"Item" is a better translation of "voorwerp". "Subject" would be "onderwerp".

Re:Voorwerp = Thing

[pnagel]

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.

Re:Voorwerp = Thing

[WarwickRyan]

"Object" would be the most accurate translation, taking into account the subject matter.

Hey....

[Izabael_DaJinn]

That's my taxi-ride home. Thank Xenu!

It is an Excession..

[sayfawa]

..and we're about to have an Outside Context Problem

Voorwerp?

[thewiz]

I didn't know that was a word.
That was the sound I made last time I threw up.
Whodathunkit.

Re:Voorwerp?

[hkz]

I'm Dutch, and the proper translation of voorwerp is actually 'object', though 'thing' comes close enough. We have a funny language sometimes. I like words like 'zodra' and 'zoiets', and saying 'goeiemorgen' has the benefit of being offensive to Russians the way we pronounce it, which since yesterday is a good thing :-)

Re:Voorwerp?

[Anonymous Coward]

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)
meewerkend voorwerp - dative case
gevonden voorwerpen - lost & found (typically referring both to the items and the booth/office to reclaim them)
onbekend vliegend voorwerp - unidentified flying object

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...

Re:Voorwerp?

[Angostura]

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?

Re:Voorwerp?

[MtHuurne]

The Dutch verb "fokken" means "to breed"; "fokkerij" is a place where animals are bred.

Re:Voorwerp?

[Askmum]

To which there is a little dutch joke.
A Dutch guy talks to an English guy:
D: I fok horses!
E: Pardon?
D: Yes, paarden!

Explanation: the term "fok horses" is the above misconjunction of fokken -> to fuck, instead of breed, and pardon, when spoken, can be misconstrued as "paarden" which is dutch for "horses".

Obviously An Ad For...

[FurtiveGlancer]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

Re:Obviously An Ad For...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You mean...could this really be...the Great Green Arkleseizure? It looks green enough to me, and surely will not fit into my back yard.

What's the rush?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Researchers are scrambling to book time on the Hubble and other major telescopes to get a closer look.

What's the rush? Isn't this celestial thing going to be out there and available for, say, the next few million years or so?

Re:What's the rush?

[John Hasler]

To beat the other astronomers.

Re:What's the rush?

[Antique Geekmeister]

The credit for the first paper to explain it, or to give the most feasible explanations cited by the next crop of graduate students, isn't going to be available for long. Discovering genuinely new classes of celestial objects depends very much on timing.

Re:What's the rush?

[negRo_slim]

To beat the other astronomers.

It's Slashdot 1st post syndrome in the real world!

Green, Blue?

[PPH]

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?

Re:Green, Blue?

[cathector]

for the first part,
according to wikipedia, "the highest confirmed spectroscopic redshift of a galaxy is ... 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.

for the second part, atoms emit across a wide range of wavelengths.
so it's more a matter of how much energy is driving the emission.

Re:Green, Blue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Keel has made a page devoted to Hanny's Voorwerp with links to relevant sites; all the current data can be accessed from here: http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/research/voorwerp.html
p.s. Hi Waveney!

Re:Green, Blue?

[DoubleEdd]

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.

The Vorrwerp Story

[Waveney]

To follow the story of the Voorwerp see the following entries in the Galaxy Zoo Blog: http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/01/18/more-on-the-voorwerp http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/01/31/the-mystery-of-the-voorwerp-deepens http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/03/20/voorwerp-fever http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/05/30/whats-an-astronomers-favourite-birthday-gift

Re:Green vs. Blue

[imsabbel]

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)

Re:Zoo

[BrentH]

Dutch != Deutsch == German

The proper Dutch translation would be:

Voorwerp niet voeren!

Or, the Dutch funny edition:

Niet voeren da Voorwerp!

Or, the Anglo-Dutch funny edition:

Niet food'n da Voorwerp!

Not always a 1:1 translation

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Translations from language to language are imprecise because there are often no 1:1 translations. The classic is Dutch "gesellig" which is approximated by "cozy".

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.

To answer, "Why the rush?"

[jordandeamattson]

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/.