Tag: Photoionization

Halloween Post – Quasar Ghosts

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  I’ve been saving this one for a few months, specifically for my Halloween post! This was such an interesting story, it was hard for me to pass it up before.  There are ghosts in these distant galaxies! Look at the images above, and see the ghostly green figures.  They are ionized Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur, and neon that has absorbed high energy radiation and slowly re-emitted it over thousands of years.  The photoionized gas clouds in the images are tens of thousands of light years outside their host galaxies, so where did this high energy radiation come from? The answer, is...

Ghosts of Quasars Past Surround Distant Galaxies

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Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’  It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy.  It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project.  Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.  The new Hubble...