Hanny's Voorwerp
astronomical object appearing as a bright blob close to spiral galaxy IC 2497 in Leo Minor, discovered by Hanny van Arkel
Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for Hanny's object) is an instance of an astronomical phenomenon called a quasar ionization echo. It was discovered in 2007 by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel while she was participating as a volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project, part of the Zooniverse group of citizen science websites. Photographically, it appears as a bright blob close to spiral galaxy IC 2497 in the constellation Leo Minor.
Description
Hanny's Voorwerp (HsV) is about the size of a small galaxy and has a central hole over 16,000 light years across. In an image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, HsV is colored green, a standard false color that is used to represent the presence of several luminous emission lines of glowing oxygen. HsV has been shown to be at the same distance from Earth as the adjacent galaxy IC 2497, which is about 650 million light-years away.
Star birth is occurring in the region of HsV that faces IC 2497. Radio observations indicate that this is due to an outflow of gas from IC 2497's core which is interacting with a small region of HsV to collapse and form stars. The youngest of these stars are several million years old.
A 40-page comic and associated promotional offers about HsV and the story surrounding it were presented at the 24th Dragon Con in Atlanta on 3 September 2010, as well as first pictures of HsV from the Hubble Space Telescope.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q604603. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hanny's Voorwerp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.