So what are they going to call this new anomaly?

Amateur Astronomer Spies Gassy 鈥楥osmic Ghost鈥?br>
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a 'cosmic ghost', a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object.

The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online.

"At first, we had no idea what it was. It could have been in our solar system, or at the edge of the universe," Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski, a member and co-founder of the Galaxy Zoo team, said in a statement.

The find, nicknamed "Hanny's Voorwerp" (Dutch for object), soon had scientists training their telescopes on the object.

"What we saw was really a mystery," Schawinski said. "The Voorwerp didn't contain any stars."

Made entirely of very hot gas, the eerie green object is illuminated by remnant light from the nearby galaxy IC 2497.

"We think that in the recent past the galaxy IC 2497 hosted an enormously bright quasar," Schawinski said.

He said light from the past still illuminates the ghostly object, even though the quasar shut down some 100,000 years ago and the galaxy's black hole went quiet.

"It's this light echo that has been frozen in time for us to observe," said Chris Lintott, a co-organizer of Galaxy Zoo at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

Researchers will soon use the Hubble Space Telescope to get a closer look.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080805/sc_n...

I am so glad you posted this due to i havent seen or heard of this yet and i am always interested in seeing and hearing of new things found in our universe. I always say space is so large we may never find all thats out there but they will always find new things some of which we can understand and others we may never understand. space can be a mystery at times which keeps all of us wondering. I also believe all of the answers are out there we just dont understand them yet. for the name which theyll call this i have no ideal but i cant wait for more imformation on it thank you for posting this

Time will tell. Many objects are named after the person who discovered it. Many are just assigned a number.

I love when things like this are found yet it has always been sitting there for aeons, but the uninitiated forever claim we could spot every dangerous asteroid that comes into our vicinity.

I guess..until there may or may not be a more permanent name for it.....it will hold on with "Hanny's Voorwerp".

That's pretty cool! They'll probably stick with Hanny's Voorwerp or Cosmic Ghost, but who knows?