hello space hands the next announcement that's coming out of the double-a s meeting this week that I'd like to share with you comes from my favorite space telescope the hubble late yesterday afternoon the the hubble team released this press release titled Hubble zooms in on a space oddity now I can only assume that space oddity is a play on words for Space Odyssey you know attempts at humor notwithstanding this is actually a pretty cool object so let me show it to you here here's the image they released and what you can immediately see is there's a very bright galaxies here this galaxy is called IC 2497 it's 650 million light years away so it's pretty far away and there is a bright green object right here in front of it and this is the object of interest this is the Space Oddity as I put it now I'm going to try and pronounce this and my apologies in advance to any of my viewers that happened to be from the Netherlands because the person that discovered this was was Dutch and the name of this object is called I believe it's pronounced honeys vorwerk now I'm sorry if I mispronounced that but it's a for work is a Dutch word meaning object so this is Hani's object could just as easily be called Hanny but I'm from homosassa Florida so I don't know how to pronounce anything Dutch so I hope my apologies if I screwed that up and I promise I won't say that again so I won't torture you with my mispronunciations but this is the object it's in question you notice it's very bright green and its a bright green because this is glowing gas and it's glowing this is an echo of light that cut that came from a quasar that no longer exists the quasar was in the center of this galaxy and it blasted this region here with radiation causing all of this gas too close now this is primarily glowing and green because this happens to be the oxygen atoms glowing so this is this is the object and let me show you a slightly higher resolution version of it here here I have a higher resolution version right here let me scroll this up notice here at the very top of this region are some orange and yellow glowing spots this is not due to the the quasar this happens to be brand new stars that were ignited as a result of the blast from that quasar the quasars radiation was so powerful that it caused the stars to begin to ignite within the k'vin the cloud so these stars are only a few million years old their brand new baby baby stars in here is one the the last distinguishing feature that I would like to point out is then here is this dark void that astronomers believe is due to the fact that there was something in between the quasar and the gas cloud itself that prevented this region from glowing there was something that was in the way and it's a cult at this part so this part here does not glow and they think that this is a signature just a shadow of something that was in between the quasar and the gas cloud now here is the chain of events that astronomers think occurred throughout this whole thing so they think it's somehow here's the galaxy and that something must have passed close by to it something big that interacted with this gravitationally and it caused a tidal wave of gas to go you know into the into the into the galaxy which ignited which fell into a black hole and ignited the quasar the quasar just blasted out and as soon as the gas had been used up the quasar then turned off so here's a cartoon of the streaming gas that would have ignited the the gas the gas cloud itself as well as started the stars forming right here so this is sort of a little timeline of what they think happened it's really quite extraordinary actually but even with all of this this is still not the most amazing part of this image to me the most amazing part of this image is how it was taken how it came to be taken it turns out that this was discovered this this green area was discovered by a Dutch school teacher who was using a web site known as Galaxy Zoo and here it is if you don't know about it you must go here and and learn about what's going on this is an a website that allows ordinary non astronomers to actually do some science and the way they do this is a they would like people as many as possible to start classifying galaxies well the the person that the school teacher was doing this and she noticed a faint green blob in one of the galaxies she was trying to classify and asked what it was and she showed it to astronomers and they look really close and they couldn't discover they couldn't determine what it was either they couldn't figure it out so they asked the Hubble or they applied for telescope time on the Hubble to look closer at this image and this is what they saw no it was really quite extraordinary um so to me that's the real story of this news release yes it's cool yes this is neat but this kind of thing is visible all the time in astronomy maybe not so much this particular sequence of events but the universe is is going to be full of things that surprise us to me the cool part was how this image came to be taken a Dutch schoolteacher working on her own showed astronomer something that they didn't know existed beforehand and to me that's what makes this cool okay well that's it for now space fans and I will talk to you a little bit later this week on some other discoveries keep looking up