The Mystery of the Voorwerp Deepens!
A couple weeks ago, I talked about the Voorwerp (“object”), the strange blue object that Hanny posted to the Galaxy Zoo forum. She asked if anyone knew what it was, and we sure didn’t. Part of the problem was that we didn’t have a spectrum for it, so it could have been literally anywhere from right next door in our galaxy to the edge of the universe. Our colleague Bill Keel took a spectrum, which he posted about here in the blog, and found that the Voorwerp is associated with the galaxy above it. We’ve since been looking around for other colleagues that can help us figure out what the Voorwerp is.
Thanks to Matt Jarvis, who was observing at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope in La Palma, we’ve been able to get some better images. The William Herschel Telescope is bigger than the telescope that gathers images for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS is 2.4 m; WHT is 4.2 m), and the images that Matt took are longer exposures, so we can see fainter features in them. The conditions were also quite good (good “seeing” in astronomer’s lingo) and so the image has very good resolution (it’s “sharper”) as the atmosphere didn’t blur things too badly.
So what kind of data did we get? We got three images in filters very similar to the SDSS ones. We got a g, r and i-band image. Those correspond roughly to green, red and infra-red for human eyes. Just to make things confusing though, we colour g in blue, r in green and i in red to stay consistent with the SDSS/GZ images. Without further ado, here are the original SDSS and new WHT images:
Original SDSS image
New WHT image
The WHT image is rotated with respect to the SDSS image; look at the orientation of the galaxy and the Voorwerp to see how they compare. Once you mentally rotate the images so they match, you can see clearly that the Voorwerp is quite a lot bigger than we initially thought, because so much of it was too faint to be visible in the SDSS image. This immediately makes us want to get an even deeper g-band (blue colour) image to see just how much bigger it is! For that, we will probably go to the world’s largest telescopes such as ESO’s Very Large Telescopes, Gemini or Keck.
To give you an idea just how big the Voorwerp is by now, look at the spiral galaxy next to it. This galaxy is a very massive spiral galaxy, likely as big or bigger than our own Milky Way! That’s really, really big!
If you look at the new WHT image of the Voorwerp, you can also see a huge, gaping hole. From the SDSS images, it wasn’t really clear whether the fuzzy structure there was anything real, but the WHT image makes it clear that this is a genuine hole. Again, just to put it into proportion, that hole has a diameter of something like 10 000 light-years. We have no good idea of what could punch such a large hole. One possibility is that a massive burst of star formation occurred there, causing a string of powerful supernova explosions, causing an expanding bubble. Such holes presumably caused by supernovae have been seen in other galaxies, but as far as we know, nothing anywhere near this size.
In his last post, Bill mentioned that the spectrum of the Voorwerp showed some very odd emission lines, in particular Helium II (HeII) and Neon V. HeII only really appears in spectra when there is something really hot around to excite the gas – something hotter than the hottest star. This could be an active galactic nucleus(i.e. gas falling into a supermassive black hole, and heating up as it falls), or perhaps some high velocity shocks. We’re busy analysing the spectrum to understand better what’s going on here.
By a luck coincidence, the Voorwerp turned out to be at a redshift where the HeII line “redshifted” into a common narrow-band filter. Such a filter blocks all light except in a very narrow wavelength range, and so lets us take an image focusing only on those areas which are emitting light in that wavelength range. Below is the image of the Voorwerp in the wavelength range of the HeII line:
The Voorwerp in HeII
The HeII emission clearly comes from a good chunk of the whole Voorwerp (again,a deeper image might show even more), so whatever is exciting the gas in the Voorwerp seems to do it over quite a large volume.
What’s next? We really still have no idea of what the Voorwerp really is. The more data we take on it, the stranger it gets. Many of us are busy trying to convince friends of ours on observing runs to take observations of the Voorwerp so we can figure out what it is.
That’s how an observational science like astrophysics works: you find something new, you don’t know what it is, so you take more data to try and understand it better and form some hypothesis about what’s actually going on and then you confirm it with more data. But we’re still at the very start of this process. The mystery deepens… *cue scary music.
190 responses to “The Mystery of the Voorwerp Deepens!”
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Galaxy Zoo 
Okay I think this is very exciting.
Maybe in Galazyzoo2 you should add an easy way to tag a photo as interesting due to artifacts like the above?
ALL the links in this entry points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift
Odd ! : ]
Odd indeed! I’ve no idea what happened to the links, but they are fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out xou.
very nice web page
You said that the heating of gases to form HeII can be caused by supermassive blackholes. Could this be what caused the hole?
That was what we thought; Kevin in particular was an advocate of this, and it’s still very tempting. The nice thing is that we wouldn’t need a supermassive black hole, just a normal stellar size one.
However, if there was any activity we should see x-rays from the centre of the hole, and we had no luck. It’s also mysterious that the hole shows up in the Ultraviolet observations we got from Swift.
As Chris says, that was an interesting idea, but it looks increasingly unlikely…
Looks like a face in the upper right!
Wow, strange object indeed.
Is the hole definitely significant.
could is simply be a random shape, either an iregular or strange spiral galaxy.
maybe its whats left of a collapsed black whole? a galaxy that has been completely eaten?. of course thats only my first guess! je je
god resource Continue also
Could it be a gas cloud that is or was being illuminated by a ion beam from the galaxy’s core? It seems similar to M87 in one of the Hubble pictures. Perhaps the ion beam punched a hole right through the cloud in the picture.
It looks to me like the remnants of an exploding supernova (or other object), where streams of matter were ejected perpendicular to the matter in the ring. Because of the viewing angle, it is difficult to see the ejected matter on the far side of the ring, but it is clearly visible on the side of the ring closest to the viewer.
Is it Doctor Who’s TARDIS traveling through the time vortex?
I certainly hope so, Isaac!
Several very interesting ideas, but God and Doctor Who? Who let them in? This is what interests me about astronomy and astrophysics; something different or unusual crops up; Nobody can supply an immediate answer. The science is in the discovery and understanding of the wider Universe, although I doubt that we will ever understand it all in one lifetime.
Keep up the good work. Today – discovery, tomorrow – some of the answers.
Apologies Guys. A fool, i.e. “Me” was allowed on-board. Anyway…
The top image reminds me of a “Buckled Wheel/Disc”.
I wonder, are we looking at the early stages of formation of a “Black Hole”?
The Blue matter being an “exhaust” emmission; a sort of back-fire effect as the “hole” kicks into life?
When a Black Hole forms, does it start from a singular-point or from something like a J-Curve? (mimicing perhaps the ‘Big-Bang”) hence the galaxy “Buckle”. If a J-curve, maybe the initial “pull” on “its” galaxy would be irregular accounting for the “Buckling” which perhaps later smooths out as the Black Hole gains strength and then as its power creates the Galaxy’s Spiral arms – bit like water going down the plug-hole.
And, If a “Black Hole” is being formed, has the collapse of the star which effectively gives the “hole” life, intitally blown parts of the “Buckled” galaxy apart, only to be able to recapture them to within the galaxy at a later date?
You’re glad I joined now. I can tell…
How DO you tag a photo that appears to have somthing odd in it separate from the galaxy you are focussed on??
Is it possible that the ‘hole’ in the voorwerp is not actually a hole at all, but just the way that it has formed? There seem to be lighter areas away from the main ‘body’ almost wisp like. Could the ‘hole’ simply be an area not yet filled by the voorwerp? Similar to what happens if you put ink in water and it flows around something, or is influenced by some other factor, maybe something emitting from the closeness of the galaxy? As we don’t yet know how it was formed could this be a possibility?
I seems to me that ‘something’ could be emitted by the galactic core along the galactic axis of rotation (possibly on both sides), and that this ‘something’ is hitting a body of gas, causing it to emit light (fluorescing or diffusing?).
If this is the case, maybe the central part of the emitted beam of ‘something’ conveys enough momentum to the gas to blast it out of its path …
It looks to me just like the conical spinning shape you get when you stir a glass of water really fast..like maybe the galaxy above it is making something underneath it spin round too. Not very scientific am I!!
I have seen these pictures and would ask a question. Could this be a picture somekind of alien technology. Mankind may be limited technologically but this could be a somekind of output or energy discharge!
What if the circular area is actually a hole, something like a caldera we’d have on earth. If the hole is indeed something like a black hole but is in fact a blue hole (something I’ve just made up). It could be a conduit to another universe created when an eruption of matter, gas, energy punched it’s way through and the blue effect you see is light reflecting off planets, suns, dust coming through from the other side – this could be a new type of galaxy we’re seeing – there has to be a first of everything, the fact that it seems to have no magnetic effect on the spiral galaxy it’s almost touching could mean the birth of something completely new.
it could a black hole (the circle bit thats black) finishing of another galaxy
Evaporated Black Hole? Anyone, anyone?
Could this be the dead remnants of the adjacent galaxy,ejected years ago,being reclaimed,with the hole being a result of gravity pulling it apart as it returns home?
If the voorwerp was a blck hole surely it would be circular and not random in shape Any explosion should have the same force in all directions
Could it possibly be a Wormhole???.
I would think that this would be a suitable task for the hubble space telescope if NASA can fix it. I assume that it could get better images from the Voorwerp.
looks like exhaust emissions from the galaxy
The “new” image has “blue clouds” scattered all around it. Particularly 2 that are a quarter the size of the main one lying just above it. Are these scraps of the original or something entirely else?
that is SO creepy!it looks like some kind of monster and its like trying to find earth and attack us so that they will be the only ones in the galaxy![sorry,i talk to much dont i?]
How much red tape would be involved to get a hubble pic?
It could be a cloud of alien nanomachines after an alien race created a technological singularity.
I believe that this object is the result of 2 galaxies merging, early stages. Since the primary galaxy is a very large spiral (sb?), it would be only natural for it to have enough gravitational influence to gobble up close by galaxies. Look at what the Milky Way has done to the LMC and SMC as an example.
I’d say the smaller galaxy has a super massive black hole, probably in the order of several tens of billion solar masses. What we’re seeing here is the result of the black hole having assimilated the closer matter up to a certain distance.
By all accounts, black holes are turning into very interesting things – recent studies show that they can reach a certain point, and run out of fuel. This means that the schwarzchild radius (event horizon) has little feeding it. This results in little X ray and gamma ray output. Since this galaxy looks like it’s quite a distance, it’ll probably be very difficult to analyse the outside regions to see what the rotational speeds of the stars are (and thus deduce the mass of the object that they are rotating).
Just my thoughts.
Dave
PS for those that don’t know, it’s now quite common knowledge that nearly every galaxy has a super massive black hole at the center. It’s turning out that it seems that they’re quite critical in early galaxy formation, and had very high energy outputs in the early stages after the big bang, hence quasars.
Hi all,
Lots of interesting ideas appearing here! Just to clear a few things up:
* The Voorwerp is as big as a galaxy, so it is much, much bigger than a star and much, much bigger than any black hole. Even supermassive black holes are small compared to the mass and size of a typical galaxy. Their gravity only affects stars very close to the centre of the galaxy they live in, a region smaller than even one pixel of the images in the post. However, they can affect large areas by shooting out powerful jets of matter and radiation. It’s a jet like that which we think must be heating up the Voorwerp.
* We know that the Voorwerp isn’t anything like a normal galaxy, as it does not contain any stars (or at least hardly any). It is just a very big blob of hot gas.
I’m sure I read this in a book, but maybe the Voorwerp is, I think, supernova or something left behind from the Big Bang..
I’m not sure, I’ll dig the book up and let you know. :>
Many questions, no real answers…Is “Blackhole” the automatic answer these days in astronomy? We see something we can’t explain (Blackhole?) I actually like the “wormhole” idea (Starryeyed Bob). Maybe three black holes slamming together and that is the vortex of all three? Or possibly the aftermath of such a wrenching meeting of forces? Possibly a sun/planet formation got “run over” by the 3 black holes converging? They would “fight” over the carcus (and at tremendus pressures) so who knows what would be formed out of such an undertaking? Since it is Sooo massive (it is large as seen) what does it weigh? Any Guess? What is the time/distance to us? Do we have mass Spectronomy of it? If so, what are the most prevelant elements? Can we detect energy emmisions? What about radio waves? Anybody point a dish antenna at it and listen? Again, wondered what the time/distance is?
Hi all
could we not be seeing the first evidence of a “white hole” that the galaxy has burst through and with better exposures we will see that the voorwerp gets bigger like a shattered window. just a thought
hi,
third pic down i think it might be some part of a meteor shower!!! strange though!
i saw somthing simular but just round and all blue but sort of like the face–
hiya,
if you look closely you can see somethink quite amazing. get back to me if you think you know what it is!
I have a question that I didn’t see answered in the article. If the blue region is associated with the galaxy, and assuming it is gas/dust/stellar stuff, what might have caused it to be there in the first place? Was it material ejected from the galaxy, residue of another cannibalized galaxy, etc? I guess I thought it’s important to notice the hole, for example, but before you have the hole, you have the original bunch of stuff. That seems to be a more fundamental question. But maybe the hole issue seems easier to resolve at first glance, perhaps. Just curious. Great stuff either way.
Also, a few other basic details: how far away is this galaxy? What’s its basic make up? Old or young (I assume its pretty old)? Could the blue region be connected to these questions in some way?
Souen February 17th, 2009 12:35 pm said it what imho could be an explanation.
hello folks,
i just want to throw in my thoughts on that picture. i cannot find the link to it but i remember that there was taken a picture of a galaxy 2-3 years ago wich had a super fast and super deadly plasma stream in the middle, source: the black hole of the galaxy. the problem was that the plasma stream hit another galaxy in the neighbourhood turning everything into dust. maybe this is just another “galaxy war” picture like the one i saw.
beautiful indeed, but cruel on the other hand.
wbr
chris
maybe this is
The spiral galaxy’s bulge has a reddish hole or smudge in it. Related? From this angle anyway, the hole or smudge seems to reiterate the cut out part of the Blue Thing.
How can the Blue Thing’s cut-out part be a black hole if starlight is coming through it?
I’m new at this project, but I’ve been doing a lot of classifying in Zoo-2. I, too, have seem some strange Thingees, and I wonder how to ID them as special. I haven’t been able to get into my favorites. What I’m doing after ‘losing’ a strange galaxy early on, is just saving EVERYTHING to my favorites, but I haven’t been able to get into my file–it won’t open–to review what I’ve done, and to see if these galaxies have an assigned number or something. Do they?
And can we change our classifications as we grow in wisdom?
Great project! And that Blue Thingee reminds of the super-duper Stargate that was built to bring the Ori ships in from another galaxy.
Two more questions about the project: What if we see two galaxies merging AND a lens/arc, for instance? Or, a ring AND a disturbance? It seems we have to choose just one, when there are sometimes more than one important feature.
Second question: I don’t have much familiarity with lens/arcs. I find myself often interpreting what I see around a galaxy as a lens/arc and also often using “Other” for globs of matter, or ball-like objects (often red, but not always) near or on top of or within a galaxy. I feel like I need more guidance on these things. A better sampling of lens/arcs (than the tutorial–where are just two of them) would help. The tutorial does not identify which of the items in the two lens/arc pictures are lens/arcs. And I need more help in being able to recognize which objects have nothing to do with the central galaxy.
To me the purity of the color signature says something – like possibly a narrow electromagnetic frequency emission associated with some sort of “laser” phenomenon.
Is it possible that a jet, or other energy pulse, originating from the nearby galaxy super massive black hole complex could excite molecules in relatively pure gas clouds having a geometry such that a coherent light emission be produced?
For instance, rarified pure nitrogen will laze in coherent ultraviolet light under certain conditions.
maybe it is a huge nebulosa (or what ever you call those places were strs are born in english…), created by almost alla the strs of a dwarf-galaxy, or something, that got too close tho the core of the bigger galaxy, and that core fired one of those “energy-jets” that you talk about here, that would make som sence, since most of it, you said, were just hot gas.
but then it is propably at least one and a half million years since it happened (by which i mean since the light sent out by it reached Earth), otherwise humanity would have recorded it somehow. probaly A LOT older
for example, there were some people in china, about 1100 years ago, that wrote down that for three days, the night sky was light as day, and in the 20th sentury, the scientist reallised that THAT had been a supernova in our own galaxy
Please let me emphasize what a few people here already asked/stated: We need an extra button that can be pressed at any stage of the classification, which tags a specific image as to be re-evaluated as there seems to be something unusual that does not necessarily have something to do with the galaxy (but it also could have). An additional entry field for a few lines of comment should then also appear.
Images tagged in that way should be re-evaluated by a specialist team.
P.
Hanny in De Wereld Draait Door,
As The World Turns;Dutch talkshow.
Wonderful! This was what I signed on for in Zoo 1. Good Catch Hanny! (I was away for a while, but am back now for the Spring, and looking forward to coming across something ubercool like Hanny’s.)
Question(s): I am sure I just missed it, (I didn’t see that question from anyone else, so I think that must have just missed it or not understood where to find the info) but what is its distance, speed, and rate of acceleration?
Can you view it at other wavelengths and get a relative red shift at different points in the Voorwerp to see if it is expanding around a common point as well as away from us? You could then construct a 3D model of it to see if it obeys gravitational laws and find out what it looks like from different lines of sight. That would be interesting.
I think its a dark galaxy, a bit like an evil twin perhaps.
The hole in the Voorwerp looks about the same size as the middle of the spiral galaxy, maybe the blueness is just blueshifted light reflecting off dust particles.
Looking at the new WHT image, you can almost see an outline to the blue stuff that mimicks the disc shape of the galaxy next to it. Also, the distribution of the blue stuff seems to mirror the star locations in the adjacent galaxy.
Failing that, do stars sneeze?
What does “redshift” mean?
i think it could be like the Northern Lights- but bigger.
Yeh i think that it should be XxQ5%Z/pie= 502squared over pie xs 2!! Or bigger!
Amazing, I think all of this is facinating! Having been a recent convert to the Zooite way of life, the Voorwerp has really inspired me, although I seem to have many more questions than answers. I wanted to see what I could find out from the pictures so I took the two best images from the website of the Voorwerp and laid the 4.5 WHT over the HeII image. I also had a look at the split channels from the 4.5 WHT image. A few interesting things showed up, (at least for me,) perhaps they’re not as remarkable as they appear. (I do understand that we may not be looking at the original images, so the following may be fatally flawed.) 😉
1. This Voorwerp really covers a huge area if everything that shows up on the green (blue) filter is part of it. A very faint blue extends upwards of the main element to a point higher than the main galaxy. Thus it would seem to cover a greater area than the entire super massive galaxy to its right. Wow!!!
2. On the 4.5 WHT image, whilst the green (blue) and red (green) channels line up perfectly, there is a slight shift in alignment of the i-band (red) channel to down and right, for most of the objects. Yet this shift in the filters doesn’t seem to occur for the Voorwerp. (I thought red-shift referred to a colour’s hue adjusting toward the red part of the spectrum, so I don’t understand why this is happening.)
3. Unrelated to the Voorwerp, there appear to be ‘hotspots’ that show up on the HeII, but not on the 4.5 WHT, and vice versa. For instance the three most prominent red spots on the 4.5 WHT. Why is that?
4. On 4.5 WHT, there appears so be a very faded miniture version of the Voorwerp, but on the red filter (green in image), adjacent (down and right,) to the smaller galaxy just down from the main super massive galaxy. Is this correct, or is it just a smudge?
I would be very interested to find out. I guess I’m hooked for good. It’s projects like this that give me faith in Humanity’s altruism. 🙂
HEY!!! That’s my home…effectionately known as Spikruilniderculp…
I’m still at primary school but I think the stars are full of wonders. I think the vorweep is extremely intresting and one of these things in the galaxy that is full of wonders. I deeply congratulate the person who discovered it…
WELL DONE!!!
How do we know how far away the Voowerp is? Closer would appear larger. It’s a 2d image. How do they know its not just beyond mars or something? All I can think of is that they can approximately triangulate from multiple telescopes, but since the edges are nebulous… Please explain.
The ‘distance’ question is answered on the second link in at the top of this article (http://www.galaxyzooblog.org/2008/01/18/more-on-the-voorwerp/)
The ‘redshift’, as revealed in the ‘spectrum’ is a bit like a visual version of the ‘doppler’ effect whereby the apparent pitch of a fire engine siren, for instance, changes as the vehicle moves past you, caused by perceived ‘wavelength stretching’… I think…
active galactic nucleus-may be
Dollars to donuts that’s a free floating hypermass that’s attracted some intergalactic gas. We’ve seen a lot of different mergers. Bt what about a galaxy collision, where one of the hypermasses loses its “galaxy”, and retains only a portion of the mass that would have been seen as the bulge.
I’m a biochemist by training, so I know very little about astrophysics, maybe in another life I would have been. I just signed up for this because I think it’s amazing.
Someone was asking about redshift. I am almost done reading a nice book called “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe” by Simon Singh. He traces the history of studying time, cosmos, scientists and theorists and most relevant theories & discoveries & flops but does so in simple English so people like me can understand it without all of the technical jargon for the pros. Check this book out!
I am not a big drinker I usually have one glass of white wine for supperand that’s my limit,but there arealwaysacceptions
to any rule. Last eavening my wife was at her quillting group and I found my self consuming a third glass of wine. I am an accountant but everone else in my family is a PHD,this results in very deep discusions in the family.I have read allmost every scientific Ammerican in the last 50 years.I inderstand about .01% of it but it keeps my mind active. My theory is about antimater (can it explain the blue spot?)After consuming my third glass of wine I commpleted my antimater theory (It also effects the big bang) We know that antimater exists;so if there are black holes there must be anitmater black holes. This indicates that there are three kinds of “mater”. Mater 1 & 2 which are anti maters to each other and the #3 which is the mater we see.What we see is interaction between 2 mirror maters and it has been going on for about 14 billion years.
Very odd, it looks like a dancing ghost.
With regard to Hanny’s Voorwerp, it looks amazingly similar to something I found while playing with the Worldwide Telescope. At first I thought it might have been a photographic anomaly as these are common, particularly when a passing aircraft’s flashing lights illuminate the mirror of the telescope taking the long exposure photograph. But in many of these you can see the instrument package at the ‘scope’s focus silhouetted in the image if you enlarge the image enough. In this case, I couldn’t tell for sure that it was a photo anomaly. It was the blue color that caught my eye in Hanny’s object – same as the critter I found. In any case, if anyone wants to look at my critter, SIMBAD has a Quasar (among other objects) in the same location. It’s ID is 2MASSJO7332861+2708513. In the Worldwide Telescope I have it’s location as RA 7:33:42 and Dec +27:05:19. Go deep to find it. Have Fun!
Maybe the object is behind it, and there is a lot of dust/gas in between the two objects. Only a certain type of light is getting through, the rest is being reflected away.
Or… that big bright thing to the south of the main galaxy is what remains of the core of the other galaxy, the debris of which, is the blue object. A galaxy collision that was so close, the denser portion of the smaller galaxy was pulled back into about larger one, and the ‘arm'(s) were left drifting off.
If the first galaxy was a single arm galaxy, and it hit ‘just right’, that could be the outcome.
My head hurts!
Could it be a space carribean?
Could it be a stream of antimatter ejected from the galactic center heating up the He? The Milky Way has a cloud of antimatter particles in its center – a lopsided one at that. This old story from the NY Times also seems relevant. Has this been imaged in the gamma ray band?
Any chance of getting Hubble or Spitzer to image this thing?
Apparently,
concerning Hubble time
Now that is exciting! Happy birthday Hanny!
It clearly isn’t a galaxy merger else there would be stars in the mysterious cloud.
My first instinct is that it is a polar jet ramming into an intergalactic cloud of diffuse gas. But, why don’t we see the jet itself and where is the jet for the opposite direction? Maybe something ran directly into the black hole at the center of the parent galaxy and blasted out material only to one side like a meteor throws up a plume when it impacts.
My next idea is it looks like an out of control object that is spewing material. I have had this image emblazoned in my mind since I was a child and the loop in the material is eerily similar.
I’m curious about the concentrations of HeII is it standard background concentrations or is it higher indicating the material comes from previous fusion activity?
Maybe an active core it spewing energy that is reacting with a cloud of gas on one side of the galaxy. The blue structure looks a bit like the ribbon a gymnast twizzles on the end of a stick. Can it be from the rotation of the “parent” galaxy?
surely its very easy! its a barcelona player sprinting to score….wow ! cant you spot the ball? now tell me, what is his name? hint : observe the left leg…
God is Great! The Universe is very exciting. We may not know now what VoorWerp really is…what will happen if one were to travel through it….what is looks anatomically from the inside…
The Universe is such a beautiful expanse of the mysterious unknown…
Fahamy
Singapore
This may be our first observation of a colliding sum
of high dense matter,(i.e. multiple black holes),
competing for core formation of a new giant Galaxy.
Which explains the size(Milky Way Size) of the
annexed Mega Giant Galaxy in abutment to it.
Is it only me who’s realised that the Voorwerp matches the galaxy next to it? I mean, they seem to be exactly the same size and mirror each others features, bright spot in the galaxy, bright spot in the ‘werp etc. Surely its just a light echo of some kind.
Maybe the galaxy next to the Voorwerp is so large that it’s actually twisting spacetime around a smidge.
I have a few observations.
1) The contrast in color spectra imply the Voorwerp is not close to the spiral galaxy that appears nearby so it is unlikely the two are related. In all probability, the Voorwerp is much closer, located in our galaxy.
2) The twisted shape implies an uneven distribution of energy and mass. There is some cohesion but no clear center of gravity.
3) It appears to be unraveling not collapsing. The shape is not consistent with indications of a collapse.
4) The consistency of color saturation is remarkable as is even the distribution of the HeII signature.
Wouldn’t HeII be more common as the by-product of a Sol-like star than an exploding giant? To me, it is as if a smaller star unravelled. Could a dwarf star reach a point at the end of its life where it explodes rather than burn out?
If anyone noticed there is a brighter speck on the tip of the voorwerp. I suspect that this could be a region of stars (which will probably by quite old) that once belong to a galaxy (call it galaxy X) but got ripped up by tidal interations of other nearby galaxys, and this could be the remant of the galaxy X that got torn apart.
The hole at could be the supermassive blackhole that would have once situated itself at the heart of galaxy X, just like virtually all other galaxys, but is now exposed as the stars, planets, gases and dust cloud are absent.
My theory for why voorwerp has a blue hue to it is that it might be consisted of inoised nitrogen which gives of a blue-purple glow when excited with electromagnetisism. Supporting my theory stated above, this can be the remant of galaxy X and that a AGN (Active Galatic Nuclei) can shoot streams of particles towards the cloud and excite it sufficiently to give of radiation in the visible spectrum but this is unlikely because the photographed galaxy does seem to have jets of any sort coming out of its core, otherwise is would have outshone the galaxy and a nearby radius of about 100,000 light years or maybe even more.
But to determine any of this we will need to get the age and composition of voorwerp or anything thinking done will only be hypothesising about the very basics of the nature of this thing which will not lead us very far. Secondly, we will need a full Spectroscopic analysis of the object or else, again, it won’t take us far when we’re just guessing about everything with no evidence to support it. We can also use measure the redshift of voorwerp and create a 3D model for it and we can look at it from different viewpoints so we can study more about it.
Thats actually a blue giant that exploded and it is almost the same size as that galaxy.Ithink =)
a blue giant is the first formation of the sun
what mght cuase th blue giant to explode?it can be caused by a comet or astroid or too much helium or hydrogene
or maybe, the hubble space telescope is broken because of rays of the sun
Just got the idea that this might be the first clues of the exsistance of a ‘White Hole’. As their name suggests, its the opposite of a black hole and it emits rather than consumes matter.
Einstein and other physists have shown that if white holes do exsist, they are unstable and that negative matter is need to support it (much like wormholes, again, if they exsist). if negative matter is not present, then the white hole will collapse into a black hole and consume the matter that it generated
This might be true because as we can see from the image taken by WHT there is a clearly defined hole in the voorwerp and that this may be the black hole that resulted from the collapse of the white hole.
If white holes exsist, they will shake the foundations of astrophysics and it might help towards the creation of the Theory of Everthing 🙂
Well space is infinate right? so that means that there has GOT to be weird and wonderful things out there. The Voorwerp is just one that has caught our eyes!
It Is amazing This Sort Of Thing exsits
This is awesome!
Hi
Have just found this web site today, think I,m hooked already.
It remind’s me of fleas living on the nose of a big dog, wondering what the strainge glowing gas is coming out of the other end of the dog.
Sorry folks, as you can see I have lots to catch up on, am interested in the book, Big Bang, the origin of the universe by Simmon Singh. Will check this book out
My thanks to Zephin
Looks to me like, the brighter galaxies center emissions, blew the hole through the other galaxy remnant. What do you think?
I think it may be an answer to more about objects in our galaxy unknown to mankind so far…
It’s possible that two galaxies could collide at a high enough speed that one of their black holes could follow a hyperbolic orbit and be flung free from the galaxy. It would then be a very large, bare black hole that would create a source of x-rays. This could illuminate nearby gas and make itself visible. One way to confirm its existence would be evidence of spiral rotation, rings or cones in the pattern of the excited gas. If we had a closer look we might be able to see this.
Space may have light producing gas clouds
possibly an irregularly shaped nebula?
i think this is supercool and all that, but we need more info before any theories can be proven. could this be somr sort of light reflecting thing, kind of like a mirror?
you can tell im not a sciency-person, still in gradeschool. ill keep researching
I think it might be a bunch of goop.
I am facing an image of formation of an elliptical galaxy and see it similar to a training Voorwerp. Would this phenomenon on the formation of galaxies?
Grateful.
Were the objects 3C321 and MS0735 clues that could help solve the mystery of WOORWERP?
There is a theory that claims classical physics applies at all levels and seeks to displace Quantum Mechanics as the most successful theory we have to date.
http://www.blacklightpower.com/new.shtml
It has two predictions that might (I said might!) apply to the Voorwerp:
The first prediction is that black holes can reach a size where they spontaneously convert to energy. You can imagine what that would do to an existing galaxy – leaving a good galaxy sized hole with a hot gas cloud around the perimeter would be a likely result.
The second prediction is that gas clouds can provide an energetic energy source by the conversion of hydrogen to sub-ground radiii which the claimant calls a hydrino. What is interesting is that the claim involves, in one case, a resonant energy transfer between atomic hydrgoen and HeI, which results in HeII, a hydrino and the release of energy in the UV.
A potential third claim is that this hydrino is claimed to possess the properties attributed to dark matter – doesn’t emit visible light but has a gravitational effect.
Of course if he is right, everything we known about science is turned on its head. but the Voorwerp kind of did that already…
I think the Voorwerp has been ejected by this galaxy along the minor axis.
I think Halton C Arp should be asked for his opinion on it.
I don’t have a clue what it is, but I want it to be a white hole or wormhole because that would turn astrophysics on its head.
[QUOTE]To give you an idea just how big the Voorwerp is by now, look at the spiral galaxy next to it. This galaxy is a very massive spiral galaxy, likely as big or bigger than our own Milky Way! That’s really, really big!
If you look at the new WHT image of the Voorwerp, you can also see a huge, gaping hole. Again, just to put it into proportion, that hole has a diameter of something like 10000 light-years.[ENDQUOTE]
If that hole is around 10000 ly across and the adjacent galaxy is as big or bigger than ours, then the Voorwerp is considerably closer to us than the galaxy. As our Galaxy is 100000 ly, if you measure ten times the hole’s width, you will reach almost to the brighter of the two ellipticals on the the left of the image.
Did anyone ever think that perhaps the blue colour is cherenkov radiation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Say, for example, that the blue light is cherenkov radiation, then that would suggest that the voorwerp is matter leftover from some explosion? the radiation itself would be caused by neutrinos or other quantum particle, released in the explosion, travelling faster than the average velocity of light (due to the slowing effect of the dense gravity and mass). The only problem with this I guess is the redshift… would that still occur in the presence of cherenkov?
suggestions…?
The mass that appears to be pulled toward that huge galaxy, from the center of the Voorwerp, looks like it would fill the hole perfectly. Could it be that the larger mass in the center of the Voorwerp is possibly heavier than the outer part and more vulnerable to the gravitational pull of the galaxy next door? Or, is there such thing as blowing a smoke ring on a galactic scale?
This is a Class I Transdimensional Conduit. It’s not the first of its kind ever observed, but certainly the largest. I feel sorry for anyone living in the galaxy nearby.
How many years would we have to wait to take another picture to make a 3d image?
Or rather , what tools are at our fingertips today to show dispersion patterns if there are any.
This is one of the things we want to use Hubble to do; by getting high-resolution spectra of different parts of the Voorwerp, we should be able to say something about how things are changing. If at all.
it might be another galaxy!!! who knows…
I saw that Mack has suggested this same thing, but for some reason when I first saw this, I thought, well maybe some kind of black hole. Then my mind strayed to Dark Matter for some reason.
Is it possible that some sort of radiation is “redshifting” the dark matter into the visible spectrum of light?
Pertaining to the Dark Matter theory though I would have no idea what would cause such a massive hole.
I saw a few posts that suggest a black hole, but like the article says, why is there no radiation? And then why did it just stop eating?
And I was wondering, what is the purple “face” in the first picture? It appears as a less dense, or simply not as bright dot in the second picture. Is it simply another galaxy we can see behind it?
why not contact nasa and the crew of the hubble, proposing a quick mission. im sure if you supply them with all your data most notably that we have no idea what this is, that they’ll want to investigate it. best of luck 😀
A strange Click went into my head for a moment
For the Voorwerp, The size and consistant color of it could possibly mean a recent Black Hole, Consuming one a tenth, hundreth, even millionth of it own size,Causing it to implode and emit off Gasses that we maybe have never come across with because of how dangerouse and unstable it is to be so near planets or w.e
And for the GIGANTIC hole,
A star could be any size, from 5,000 lightyears across, to 100ly’s across, At the rate of its death it could have, expanded to 3, 4 or 5 times its size, and sizzled ANYTHING in its way, and causing many other strange plantets, or space junk in its path
Ok… read thru most posts… any luck on using Hubble? ESA? Also, do you know how uniform g band emission is across the object? Definitely the brighter confluence in the “NE” tip appears starlike, but not conclusive. This is absolutely amazing!
Since it ‘may’ fit the concept of a black hole that lost its gravitational pull, could the irregularity surrounding it be accounted by a non-symetrical explosion of the hole?
Here is the ‘out there’ theory.
The nearby galaxy is inhabited. The black hole was consuming a neighboring galaxy and would threaten the visible galaxy in short time.
The inhabitants of the intact galaxy found a way to destroy a black hole, creating an irregular discharge.
hi
i maybe just 14 but i have a theory could this be a fragment of an explosion soo far back in the past that it is a remnant of the “BIG BANG” and has been in the same spot for millions of years and as time passed a galaxy has formed near it?? ohh and btw i have send a e mail to the zoo keepers about some other strange objects i have seen in some images hope i get a reply > thanks
cool…
I dont understand why this is relevant to my life.
yeahhh im sooo hooked mannn !
screw this website for giving us homework
clouds of gases like rain clouds lit up by the stars
Ok.. this might sound weird.. but perhaps it’s like a vent for a black hole, or a worm hole….
Could it be Galaxy poop?
Could it be an intergalactic nebular that has newborn star clusters inside it that are emiting ultraviolet light,therefore lighting the nebula?
I’m only 11 but I think it could be a remenent of a massive hypernova explosion!
Could it an irregular galaxy?
Could it be one of those mystery dark galaxys with a gobular cluster passing though it?
Random thoughts, could there be some gravitational lensing effect going on around or affected by a heavy object – a bit like lense flare when you photograph towards the sun (our sun that is) and can light get a slingshot effect from a heavy object in the way that satellites can use planets to get a kick onwards? Could that provide a ‘blue shift’?
By looking at all three pictures I think it is getting closer and closer to the nearby galaxy. Because if this, it may be a black hole.
I think it is a dead galaxy. It’s a galaxy that collapsed some long time ago. Though the thingy about its effects on the matter around it is still baffling. But what it may be is something we have never encountered before in any photographs, I mean something like this may have been photographed in other images, but never noticed before. Notice, we have never seen dead galaxies before, unless black-holes are what they are. If in a spiral galaxy, all matter is being pulled to the center, then at some point the whole thing will blow up, or collapse to a black-hole. This may be the one that blew-up. Notice that on the far right there are traces of the same stuff it is made of, sort of drifting into deeper space.
Like someone else said, it may be something completely new (to us though).
These two how ever seem to be heading for a collision.
“*cue scary music” out..
there are obvious tells of gravitational lensing. maybe two super massive black holes came close to colliding but failed to merge. this would cause rips in time and space. maybe the blue shift is from this. and the hole an anti singularity.
How do you know that object is near the galaxy in the center of the image , and not in our milky way?
If it’s not so distant, it’s easy to explain (supernova, gaz …)
It looks a lot like space tornado’s to me, just from a different angle. I do however think the galaxy pictured is at the final stage of merging with another, any merging black holes would emit huge energy waves at the poles, which could possible explain gasses in the nearby universe being excited and whipped up in to a tornado.
Whatever the source, it just goes to show what exciting things can be found as a result of sharing information publicly.
High, i am an amateur astronomist. I have studied 2 yrs @ Leiden University. Could this be an effect of the superfluidity and superconductivity of helium in combination with high rotation velocities and BEC state ? Maybe a very high rotating velocity has reached one of the vortex values of the BEC state causing some sort of transfer in mass due to zero entropy energy emission which are influenced by the elecotromagnetic fields of the galaxy nearby? Frankly i do ot really undertand what i am saying here, but it sounds cool !
No really serious now: the dark spot could also be a quark star or strange star. I read this on wiki: It is theorized that when the neutron-degenerate matter which makes up a neutron star is put under sufficient pressure due to the star’s gravity, the individual neutrons break down into their constituent quarks, up quarks and down quarks. Some of these quarks may then become strange quarks and form strange matter. The star then becomes known as a “quark star” or “strange star”, similar to a single gigantic hadron (but bound by gravity rather than the strong force). Quark matter/strange matter is one candidate for the theoretical dark matter that is a feature of several cosmological theories.
Hi,
couldn’t it be some kind of “jet remnant”, i.e. the remains of a jet like in M87?
Stefan
Whatever the Voorwerp is, I’m just glad it isn’t that too close to home !!!!
Would be great to see if Nasa would use the Hubble on this intriguing puzzle though ….
Remnants of an artificially destroyed galaxy via novae. If this was a billion years ago couldn’t it be possible?
I find the thought processes to understand this is enormous and it would be incredible if there were ot to be a galaxy similar to ours and even inhabited too
I meant to say” not to be a galaxy similar.”
its my new key board which is having trouble spelling
is there an alien behind of those stras
Hmmm… May be a wobling black hole in the near by galaxy is sending a yet to be seen jetstream out. The stream is hitting gas and exites it to blue light. That would explain the hole in the Voorwerp. NASA: Moove it!
possibly a gravitational lens point?
IT’S A TRAP!
Perhaps, a wandering black hole …traveling thru space?
KentuckyFC writes
“In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny’s Voorwerp (meaning Hanny’s object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny’s Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire.”
could it be a small galagy that collapsed in its core?
It is matter from another dimension. It came from the hole created when gravity from both dimensions was strong and close enough to stretch a hole in space/time.
When holes like these open, matter that can be exchanged through dimensions, is exchanged.
It happens with most black holes, (we just don’t know it yet) and sometimes when very massive stars line up in space/time with massive bodies in other dimensions. (The pull must come from both dimensions) It is the warping of time from the massive gravity that creates the environment for this to occur.
Just my thoughts.
surya
Probably a merger of smaller gas-galaxies, which now appears quite big after the event occured.
I say Voorwerp is the remains of another galaxy that smashed into the bigger galaxy. It’s the matter that didn’t get captured by the bigger galaxy, and it is spinning very fast. A massive galactic smoke ring. But what the heck do I know??
I don’t think this is being caused by “cone of radiation “. The reason is if you look above the large blue circle there is a smaller blue arm blob, swinging up and going counter- clockwise. This seems to show that something other than a cone of directed energy is at work
it looks like the aftermath of an extremely large explosion to me
I don’t know alot about different dimensions but when I first read this artice I wondered what that blue stuff was too. I thought that it might be a whole new type of matter that hasn’t been discovered yet and (from reading a different comment) that mabye came from another dimesion. I have know idea how different dimensions work at all so what I’m saying might be a load of rubbish, although you never know with these type of things!
I can imagine it will eventually be recognized as the birth of a galaxy from a black hole. I think the exchange of matter that appears to some as going on, is illusory; but rather the clumping of normal visible matter being compressed by gravity wells of various strengths in the region. This may be how all galaxies got their start . What direction is this spinning? Is it spinning in the same direction as nearby galaxies and so on?
Could the blue be a cluster of smaller and large galaxies both closer and further away????? And could the hole represent a part of space with a giant black hole?
It’s V-Ger!
Come on, you guys can’t tell me that doesn’t look like the giant neon/ blue formation of gas from the original Star Trek motion picture.
Its possibly synonymous with Gamma ray ‘jets’ or a burst directed from the polar regions of a black hole around the magneoshere combined wityh helium, in the creation of matter stage, at the periphery of he magnetoshere, possibly typcal in the birth of our Galaxies?
Gamma Ray burst from the magnetic pole of a Black Hole.
Ionising Helium and appearing as matter at the interior regions of the magnetoshere
remenants of a supernova ? This also has a small glow at the tip ( closer to the galaxy) as if its illuminated by the nearby galaxy
These are some incredible images.
What does the hubble shou???
What does the hubble show???
this has got to be one of the biggest brain storming sessions in the world.any chance we can ask prof cox.
look like glowing gases,
Has anyone determined the orientation of the voorwerp to the plane of the adjacent galaxy? Also, orientation with regards to the center of the galaxy?
The obvious explanation is that it is a blob of gases being illuminated and excited by a Gamma ray ‘jet’ from the galactic black hole. Probably too simple!
Just my two cents: perhaps it is a super-massive dark or reflective nebula and the spectrum we’re seeing is the reflection or emanation from the neighbor galaxy.
Notice how the ‘brighter’ section is closer to the galactic core and gets dimmer as it moves away. Maybe the ‘hole’ is similar to dark nebulae in our own galaxy.
What do I know? I just started learning about galaxies stellar objects a couple days ago.
With the little I know. Could it be a concentration of Dark matter/energy that is in the process of creating Hell? I know the theory that all matter was created with the big bang. But I believe there are places where new matter is created. Matter has been found to “pop” out of what we think is nothingness. Why not here?
I have it on good authority that this is the remnants of an exploding Vogon warship that was carrying 137 thousand tons of shaving cream.
I would ask if such a thing only can be seen near a galaxy or in which relation it may be to the galaxy, if there is one. Or is it something which is not directly related to the galaxy. And of course: can we find more of that kind.
No one has mentioned anything about the green glow next too/ below the elliptical galaxy close to the spiral with the blue glow below it. You said something about green pees, but this has arms/branches associated with it. This thought came to me while writing the first part. We have discovered different colored sprites above thunder storms,could this process be along the lines of energy output of the close galaxy exciting diffuse gas nearby?
Could be we have just found our first “wormhole exit” ?
Matter from another part of the universe is being thrown out of this black hole exit and being drawn towards the spiral galaxy?
Who knows ? I’m not an expert on shaving cream so i will not get into that one!
Heck, it’s just someone that forgot to take down their Christmas lights.
is it not matter that how it was really happened ?
SPACE IS FULL OF GALAXIES, CREATED BY A STRONGEST SPACE ITSELF, OUR EYE’S HAVE LIMITATIONS TO SEE ALL THESE OBJECTS EVEN.
KNOWING, LEARNING & NAMING IS NOT A BAD THING, SO I HAVE ENTERED THIS AREA.
AIM TO NAME A GALAXY, BEFORE END THIS LIFE.
Obviously this is a lone wolf black hole near a spiral galaxy. The black hole is attracting dust and gas from the spiral galaxy which can only be detected as the dust and gas heats up (the blue effect) as it approaches and falls into the black hole.
Perhaps this is a white hole, the matter being seen has been emitted from the white hole at the speed of light and it is in an excited state. I would think a white hole would work in the opposite direction as a black hole, thus the 10k light year hole.
Many of the suggestions so far have ignored the size of this region. I know of no-one who grasps the scale involved. We need better data and probably better brains!
Maybe an inn between type 2 or type3 civilization ?
The new WHT image:
I find what i see a bit hard to describe, as danish, and not english is my primary language. looks like ‘reflections of eachother’. Look at the same-shaped core, left, and hole, right. There is more matches in shape, -In fact i will try to match them, as i think they are each others template. This Voorwerp is like an imprint [not mirroring]made by the galaxy.
I wonder what the green stuff at the bottom of the WHT picture is. Anyone else notice it?