THE HUBBLE space telescope has zoomed into the Hanny’s Voorwerp (Hanny’s object), an unexplained space oddity, to unveil a pocket of young star clusters within it and solve other mysteries. Hanny’s Voorwerp is a giant floating structure of unknown nature that glows unusually green close to the massive galaxy IC 2947, around 650 million light years away. (Our galaxy, the Milkyway, is 0.1 million light years wide.)
Hubble’s observations have led to the discovery of the critical relationship between the Voorwerp and the adjoining galaxy. The galaxy’s core releases an outflow of gas that interacts with a small region in the Voorwerp, which is collapsing and forming stars.
Earlier this year, scientists discovered that the characteristic green light is also a result of the Voorwerps’s interaction with the IC 2947. The core of the galaxy emits a searchlight beam that illuminates the Voorwerp.
This beam came from a quasar — a bright, energetic object that is powered by a black hole. The quasar is thought to have turned off less than 2,00,000 years ago.
Such a relationship between a galaxy and a celestial body is unheard of and indicates a kind of indirect recycling of stars where ancient light, a result of dead stars, plays a role in powering the birth of new stars. The youngest stars in the Voorwerp cluster observed by the Hubble are only a million years old. The Voorwerp itself has been a subject of unique astronomical discovery since it was spotted by a Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel when participating in an online citizen science project called Galaxy Zoo where members of the public help classify more than a million galaxies catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
The ESA claims that Hubble’s observations present the sharpest view yet of Hanny’s Voorwerp.
The Hubble space telescope project is an international co-operation between ESA and Nasa which has scanned the skies for far-out celestial bodies since 1990 and benefits from its unique vantage point.