ichaoren

Citizen science comes up big

The new Hubble discoveries burberry outlet are the latest finds in an ongoing probe of Hanny's Voorwerp, which is named for Hanny van Arkel. Van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, discovered the ghostly structure in 2007 while participating in the online Galaxy Zoo project.

Galaxy Zoo enlists the public to help classify more than a million galaxies catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The project has expanded to include the Hubble Zoo, in which the public is asked to assess images of tens of thousands of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope.

In the new study, researchers report that Hubble's cameras have uncovered star birth in a region of Hanny's Voorwerp that faces the spiral galaxy IC 2497, which is about 650 million light-years from Earth.

Radio observations had previously shown an outflow of gas from the galaxy's core. The new Hubble images reveal that the galaxy's gas is interacting with a small region of Hanny's Voorwerp, which is collapsing and forming stars. The youngest stars are a couple of million years old, researchers said.