Hubble solves mystery of strange green cloud..

An interesting article about an anomoly discovered in 2007.

Back in 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a deep mapping survey of galaxies using a 98-inch telescope based in New Mexico, photographed a strange blue-green cloud next to the galaxy IC 2497 located in the constellation of Leo Minor. It was later flagged by Hanny Van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher participating in the online Galaxy Zoo project.

You’ll recall the Galaxy Zoo invites the public to examine and classify photos of galaxies taken by Sloan Survey and Hubble Space Telescope. Hanny noticed the strange cloud and alerted the project coordinators to it. It was soon nicknamed Hanny’s ‘Voorwerp’ (Dutch for ‘object’) and astronomers scheduled additional observations of the odd bit of fluff with the Swift satellite, the Hubble and others.

Source

The article goes on to say that it was created due to the gravity of a another passing galaxy.

Based on new photos and observations shared today by astronomer Bill Keel of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and leader of the Hubble study, astronomers say the weird cloud is a long streamer of gas pulled out of IC 2497 by the gravity of a passing galaxy.

Thoughts ATS?

I think it's great the Hubble among other tools is giving us more and more information about our discoveries and slowly filling in the blanks for the things we simply do not understand about our universe.

~Keeper

Very interesting, I remember scouring through the SDSS with WorldWind a few years ago.. good times, and to think I could have helped out with all those wasted hours too.

It doesn't make much sense to me how this outflow of gas the size of our own galaxy can escape the gravitational pull of IC-2497's black hole because of another galaxy passing by. Seems like the closer black hole should have kept the gas in check, unless the passer-by galaxy was much bigger, but then wouldn't IC-2497 have been torn apart or at least had its stars more disfigured from the larger gravitational pull?

I call bushwah, fiddlesticks, and cobs! It's obviously Galactus, and they're trying to cover it up! ...On a serious note, though, I'm glad they found out what in the world that was. It definitely didn't look like anything I'd ever heard of in my life.

reply to post by tothetenthpower

So not only can galaxies pass by one another without colliding, which sounds logical actually. But they can attract material from one towards the other causing a separation of this material from the original galaxy. I wonder if this is a new observation to this effect?
Furthermore, can stars and planets do the same thing?