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Comment Re:None of the above (Score 1) 359

postulate: most people:
-lookup to the people north of them
-think that the people south of them are a bunch of idiots (weather not withstanding)
-feel that people west of them are a herd of unregulated cowboys
-see the people east of them as corrupt as humanity can get.

Now how's that for a poll?

Submission + - Poll: How 3d do you want your tv?

zoefff writes: -polarized glasses ready
-blue and red glasses ready
-no glasses ready
-about 3 cm
-about 10 cm
-tubes all the way: 1 m
-I'm already satisfied
Space

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."

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