As announced earlier, the Hubble Space Telescope recently opened its eyes in the direction of Hanny’s Voorwerp and the nearby galaxy named ‘IC 2497’. The first set of pictures were taken Easter Sunday and appeared in my mailbox not much later than that.
Last Monday, the 12th of April, was the second big day for our investigation and another set of images were sent to my mailbox. Lots of people have asked me about them, for which I want to thank you all! It’s nice to see so many people are still eager to learn what that Voorwerp is.
And I’m sorry we don’t have a proper answer yet, but I can tell you: as soon as we do, you will definitely hear from us! For now, maybe you’ll like these facts as sort of a little peek behind the scenes:
- The first three pictures, of the area my Voorwerp lives in, were smallish black and white (well, grey) ones.
- The excellent Bill Keel, who’s leading the investigation, wrote up a ‘how to handle Hubble images’, to explain what it is we’re working on.
- I’m saying ‘we’ as I’m officially a Co-I (co-investigator) and as such I now have 26 e-mails in my mailbox with the subject ‘Voorwerp HST data’.
- The second set of pictures were close-ups of Hanny’s Voorwerp. And one of them even showed some colours!
- While I can’t quote any of the comments on the science, I can tell you Zookeeper Kevin Schawinski (who’s also still working on the Suzaku/XMM-Newton results) thinks the images are beautiful: “Once we have all the data reduced, I will print this in the glossiest format possible to hang on my wall.”
- And Bill added: “This will be visually very interesting! Kermit the frog has fingers.”
- I’ve also already been in touch with someone from HST Public Outreach and we made the front page of The Birmingham News!
And though I can’t wait for us being able to show the results to the whole world, for now it is kind of exciting to have these pictures on my laptop and having to tell my parents even that I can’t send them as they are top-secret!
So here’s a picture of the same area, but taken by my friend Graham (on Easter Sunday). The stars marked red together form the constellation Leo Minor. The green circle marks the place where my Voorwerp is located – 700 million light-years from Earth.
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Hanny’s Voorwerp – Kermit the frog has fingers. I want to see his nails!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Todd Barrow. Todd Barrow said: so cool RT @hannyvanarkel: About the Hubble images of my Voorwerp: http://bit.ly/cL1iLN [...]