X-ray paper submitted!
Just a quick note: I’ve finally submitted the paper on the X-ray observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp with XMM-Newton and Suzaku. It’s a Letter so we should hear back fairly soon, so stay tuned!
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Galaxy Zoo gets highlighted by the 2010 Decadal Survey
Every decade, the US astronomy community gets its leaders together to write up a report on the state of the field and to recommend and rank major projects that should be supported by the government over the next decade. It’s a blue print, a wish list and often also a sober exercise in what to [...]
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Voorwerp Web-Comic: Authors meeting at CONvergence
Have you ever looked at the Voorwerp and said to yourself, “Doesn’t that look like the Swamp Thing?” Or maybe you’ve seen Kermit the Frog dancing, or a maybe you see foliage run amok. There is just something about the Voorwerp that make me, for one, want to anthropomorphize it as a monster, and I’m betting [...]
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XMM-Newton is observing Hanny’s Voorwerp TODAY!
Hi all,
Just a quick note – our observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp have been scheduled for today and are taking place now. Since we’re observing in the X-rays, our “quick snapshot” to see what is going on actually takes almost a whole day. XMM-Newton’s eye isn’t very sharp, so we won’t get a [...] -
Voorwerping, Part 2
We’ve been working hard at making sense of the X-ray data from Suzaku and it turns out we (that is, Shanil) will have to do a very, very careful analysis of the data beyond what is described in the handbook to be sure we understand what the data mean. In the meantime, I’ve started the [...]
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Voorwerping, Part 1
I’m working on the Suzaku data that we’ve obtained on IC2497, the galaxy next to Hanny’s Voorwerp. X-rays, especially the really energetic ones that Suzaku is able to detect are probably the best way to probe whether the black hole in a galaxy is actively feeding or not. Shanil Virani and I are currently working [...]
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Hubble, meet Galaxy Zoo. Galaxy Zoo, meet Hubble.
Regular blog readers will know that we were all hugely pleased to find out that our proposal to observe Hanny’s Voorwerp with Hubble was approved. This was especially welcome because we expected a very high oversubscription rate for next year – new and repaired instruments meant that there was pent-up demand for some kinds of observations which have [...]
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The Mystery of the Voorwerp Deepens!
A couple weeks ago, I talked about the Voorwerp (”object”), the strange blue object that Hanny posted to the Galaxy Zoo forum. She asked if anyone knew what it was, and we sure didn’t. Part of the problem was that we didn’t have a spectrum for it, so it could have been literally anywhere from [...]