Cosmic ghosts

A dutch am­a­teur as­tron­o­mer has found a new class of as­tro­nom­i­cal ob­ject. Re­search­ers are call­ing the strange, gas­e­ous glob in the mid­dle of the pho­to simply a Voor­werp (Dutch for "ob­ject.") Sci­en­tists from Yale and Ox­ford uni­ver­si­ties be­lieve it con­sists of hot gas of tem­per­a­ture about 10,000 Cel­si­us. What lights it up is a mys­tery, since it ap­pears to con­tain no stars. Re­search­ers are guess­ing that the gal­axy above it, IC 2497, was much brighter long ago. The il­lu­mi­na­tion of the Voor­werp would then be due to left­over light from that dis­tant past, on­ly just reach­ing the Voor­werp. Dutch school­teach­er Hanny van Arkel found the ob­ject in archived im­ages of the night sky as a vol­un­teer with Ga­laxy­Zoo.org, a proj­ect that al­lows mem­bers of the pub­lic to take part in as­tron­o­my re­search.

source: World Science