Sorry my comment is a bit late, but I just read all of yours and they all made me smile! And very nice article – thanks!

And yes, ‘voorwerp’ is usually used for smaller objects, but it’s not really *that* interesting that people with cameras want to hear, if you see what I mean.

Cheers,
Hanny.

I think a digit slipped in copying the NED redshift – IC 2497 is at z=0.0499, around 700 Mlyr.

And thanks for all the kind words in the effectiveness of the comic – that’s what we aimed for! It was an extra freebie that the artists seriously improved my hair.

None of that really matters for the astronomical object it designates anyway.

So my numbers should be 570,000,000 years ago for “now”, and 570,100,000 years ago for “then”. I got the 100 thousand lightyears from the fact that the distance between the galaxy and the cloud seems to be about the same as the diameter of the galaxy (to an order of magnitude) and the Milky Way is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter. Clearly very rough numbers…

Also, the quasar shut down sometime before 570,000,000 years ago but more recently than 570,100,000 years ago.

When we look out into the universe, we are seeing objects at various distances and of various ages. Kind of like trying to piece together the stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon by looking at a pile of rubble at the bottom of a landslide. (If you’ve ever been there, you may have noticed that there are literally hundreds if not thousand of landslides lining the canyon, along with hundreds of cinder cones. Oooh! Volcanoes!)

Seriously, this is way cool.

I’m a little confuse about the geometry though. Is the current thinking that there’s a big cloud of gas surrounding the galaxy, and the quasar, when it was active was emitting two jets out of its poles, one more or less pointed towards us and the other in the opposite direction, but has since stopped? Then the jet pointed towards us faded from sight, but the jet pointed away from us, zapping the cloud, making the big hole in it, and making the gas surrounding the hole glow intensely, hasn’t faded yet because it is several hundred thousand lightyears farther away, and we’re still seeing it as it was “then” versus what it looks like “now”? Where “now” is 10 billion years ago and “then” is 10,000,100,000 years ago.

(I had to invent the distance out of whole cloth. The book and accompanying materials say that the Voorwerp was spectroscopically determined to have the same red shift and thus be at the same distance as the neighboring galaxy, IC 2947, but I can’t find the actual red shif t or distance *anywhere*. Numbers, please! This is SCIENCE.)

So everyone who got the degree wasted years of their life? That sucks.

-So true! It’s refreshing to actually hear that from someone.

It’s a cute story, but also an important one. You don’t need a big fancy degree or even years of experience to make a big discovery. Sometimes what you need is a bright, curious mind, and the desire to explore.

Very true. Most kids start off this way. Sadly most of them seem to lose that boundless curiousity and desire to explore somewhere along the way.

Hanny & the Voorwerp – great story, great idea, hopefully a great comic.

And Phil – if you do decide to pitch it, and the Discovery Channel Lawyers try to hem and haw about it – drop a small asteroid on them and tell them it’s just an idea, and ideas can’t be copyrighted!

(added after Jamey´s response: all copyrights feas must be used to buy Gallileo telescopes for schools around the world. Settled.)

And, surprisingly, my spellchecker knows “doohickey” and “thingamabob”.

As you can see, the name stuck.