Hanny's Voorwerp is the Dutch term for Hanny's Object. It is an enormous object, about the size of our own milky way galaxy. The glowing greenish color of the galaxy comes from ionized oxygen atoms. It lays below spiral galaxy IC 2497 which is the pinkish swirl above. This picture was taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and the galaxies are both located 650 million light-years away in the constellation Leo Minor which we have yet to learn. The green cloud is now suspected to be part of a tidal tail of material illuminated by a quasar and follows the above galaxy IC 2497. The quasar which was powered by a massive black hole at the center suddenly stopped working, thus leaving it so only the green glow can be seen by the telescope at optimal wave lengths. This mystery galaxy was discovered only recently when Hanny van Arkel noticed it while participating in the Galaxy Zoo project in 2007.
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