Take A Breath... Admire A Voorwerp...

[WillyT]

Mystery Green Blob In Space Captured By Hubble (PICTURE)
SETH BORENSTEIN, AP/HuffPo
First Posted: 01-11-11 09:55 AM | Updated: 01-11-11 01:26 PM

<snip>

WASHINGTON -- The Hubble Space Telescope got its first peek at a mysterious giant green blob in outer space and found that it's strangely alive. The bizarre glowing blob is giving birth to new stars, some only a couple million years old, in remote areas of the universe where stars don't normally form.

The blob of gas was first discovered by a Dutch school teacher in 2007 and is named Hanny's Voorwerp (HAN'-nee's-FOR'-vehrp). Voorwerp is Dutch for object. NASA released the new Hubble photo Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Parts of the green blob are collapsing and the resulting pressure from that is creating the stars. The stellar nurseries are outside of a normal galaxy, which is usually where stars live. That makes these "very lonely newborn stars" that are "in the middle of nowhere," said Bill Keel, the University of Alabama astronomer who examined the blob.

The blob is the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and it is 650 million light years away. Each light year is about 6 trillion miles. The blob is mostly hydrogen gas swirling from a close encounter of two galaxies and it glows because it is illuminated by a quasar in one of the galaxies. A quasar is a bright object full of energy powered by a black hole.

The blob was discovered by elementary school teacher Hanny van Arkel, who was 24 at the time, as part of a worldwide Galaxy Zoo project where everyday people can look at archived star photographs to catalog new objects.

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/11/hannys-voorwerp-green-blob-hubble_n_807298.html

Ok... carry on.

:hi:

[Angry Dragon]

1. All kinds of strange things in this vast universe

[Hell Hath No Fury]

2. Cooool!

Think about all the stuff we don't know about the Universe around us -- stuff we can't see yet but is just waiting to be discovered. Our little corner is just like a grain of sand on a beach.

[pruple]

3. K&R

[emilyg]

4. k/r

[yoyossarian]

5. I for one welcome our new alien overlords!

This is EXACTLY like that old movie The Blob!... EEK! HELP!

Actually, I have a theory that explains all of this.
God is squeezing a zit.

:rofl:

Cool post, dude! Thanx!

[Kalyke]

6. So, THAT'S where Slime comes from!

P.S. I purposely used Johnny Depp's picture. He's so freaking cool.

[WillyT]

7. Kick !!!

:kick:

[nc4bo]

8. It's not a blob, it's an ovary!!! It's beautiful! nt