Telescope Reviews: "Cosmic Ghost" Discovered by Volunteer Astronomer

When Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and his colleagues at Oxford University enlisted public support in cataloguing galaxies, they never envisioned the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in archived images of the night sky.

The Dutch school teacher, a volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project that allows members of the public to take part in astronomy research online, discovered a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a "cosmic ghost."

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"It's amazing to think that this object has been sitting in the archives for decades and that amateur volunteers can help by spotting things like this online," said Hanny van Arkel. "It was a fantastic present to find out on my 25th birthday that we will get observational time on the Hubble Space Telescope to follow-up this discovery."

The next stage of Galaxy Zoo will ask volunteers to search for more unusual astronomical objects. But, "Hanny's Voorwerp" remains a mystery. It's huge central hole is over 16,000 thousand light years across and Galaxy Zoo astronomers are still puzzling over what caused it.

Full Press Release Here: "Cosmic Ghost" Discovered by Volunteer Astronomer

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"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." -- Sir Isaac Newton