The Ghost of a Black Hole: Hanny's Voorwerp in the News
One of the most exciting results of Galaxy Zoo is that of the mysterious ‘Voorwerp’ (Dutch for ‘object’) discovered by Hanny van Arkel. She posted about a strange blob on our forum and we have been hooked by it ever since. The Voorwerp has hit the news this week as we’re starting to understand just what it is. We’re collecting some of the news coverage here:
- Oxford and Yale press releases. You can also listen to this podcast [mp3].
- English: BBC, CNN, New Scientist, Nature, Reuters
- Dutch: Elsevier, De Volkskrant
- German: Der Spiegel.
We will update this as we find more. Hanny is also maintaining a much more detailed list on the forum.
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UPDATE: Hanny made the headline on CNN
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UPDATE: We made it to NPR Science Friday. Click here to download the mp3.
Galaxy Zoo Paper update
With so many fabulous results working their way through the system, you’d be forgiven for losing track of exactly what’s happening with the Galaxy Zoo papers, so I thought a quick update was in order.First of all, the 5th Galaxy Zoo paper has been submitted, presenting the initial results of our study of Hanny’s Voorwerp; one simple question on the forum has led to a paper with 19 authors, from 14 different institutions. 
We’ve already had a first response from the referee, who told us that we needed to be more careful with some of the results we were reporting; we’ve corrected our missteps, and it’ll go back to the journal today. We also had a referee’s response to Steven’s paper, and will let you know more when we can.Various other papers are in the works; in the last week or so I’ve spent a lot of time arguing over the mergers sample, taking a closer look at rings and having my first look at Anze’s work on rotating spirals. Plenty more work to do, and plenty more news to tell you about as we continue to make the most of all your hard work.Chris
Old GZ Forum – Data Update
As many of you are aware, over the past 9 weeks I have been trying to retrieve some of the old Galaxy Zoo Forum data that was lost at the beginning of June. A massive outage at ThePlanet.com TX, USA, where the Forum was previoulsy hosted, caused damage to the web server HDD and has resulted in us trying to restore the missing forum backup content using Data Recovery Services in California. Unforunately the chances of restoring this data would now appear to be remote.
I have been in constant contact with ThePlanet.com and their most recent report stated that “despite strenuous efforts to recover the data from the damaged HDD, so far very little has been salvaged. They are continuing to extract what they can, but realistically there is very little chance of finding anything usable.”
It is pretty disappointing news, especially since the data loss was outside our control, but hopefully it has resulted in only minimal inconvenience for our amazing army of forum zooites!. I will keep you updated via the Galaxy Zoo Blog as soon as more information is available. Thankfully, Edd managed to get the Galaxy Zoo Forum back running again a few weeks ago and it seems to be continuing to to grow ever bigger.
Philip Murray
Galaxy Zoo Team & Fingerprint Digital Media
