Cosmic Curiosity Reveals Ghostly Glow of Dead Quasar

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2010) — While sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffled professional astronomers. Two years later, a team led by Yale University researchers has discovered that the unique object represents a snapshot in time that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes.

In a new study, the team has confirmed that the unusual object, known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's "object" in Dutch), is a large cloud of glowing gas illuminated by the light from a quasar -- an extremely energetic galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. The twist, described online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is that the quasar lighting up the gas has since burned out almost entirely, even though the light it emitted in the past continues to travel through space, illuminating the gas cloud and producing a sort of "light echo" of the dead quasar.

"This system really is like the Rosetta Stone of quasars," said Yale astronomer Kevin Schawinski, a co-founder of Galaxy Zoo and lead author of the study. "The amazing thing is that if it wasn't for the Voorwerp being illuminated nearby, the galaxy never would have piqued anyone's interest."

The team calculated that the light from the dead quasar, which is the nearest known galaxy to have hosted a quasar, took up to 70,000 years to travel through space and illuminate the Voorwerp -- meaning the quasar must have shut down sometime within the past 70,000 years.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101103171638.htm

[BrklynLiberal]

1. 70,000 years!!!!! but..but...how would the creationist explain that???

GREAT pics and fascinating article.

There is so very, very much out there that we do not know about...

The links in that article go to some truly incredible stories..

[Odin2005]

2. Incredible! Thanks!

[struggle4progress]

3. Since Hanny's Voorwerp is 700 million light-years away, if it took 70000 years for the quasar light

to travel there, the quasar must have shut down about 700.070 million years ago, not 70000 years ago

[eppur_se_muova]

4. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio ... nt