voorwerp

plural voorwerps · alternative Voorwerp

1. astronomyAn ionization or light echo, especially the quasar ionization echo known as Hanny's Voorwerp.

   Other voorwerps have since been spotted, but Hanny holds the distinction of finding the first, with nothing more exotic than a public website and the power of the human brain.

   2018 February 15, Matt Brown, Everything You Know About Space is Wrong, Batsford, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   The voorwerp turns out to be a cloud of gas tens of thousands of light-years across, which has somehow been heated to high enough temperatures to emit visible light. The exact mechanism of the heating is still under debate, but probably[…]

   2014 December 9, Chad Orzel, Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, Basic Books, →ISBN

   But regardless of which explanation is correct, or even if some other explanation is needed, the voorwerp is fascinating. Suppose, for instance, that it really is a quasar mirror. As we've seen, this means that the voorwerp is a huge collection of mirrors, echoing the light of the quasar at many different times over the quasar's lifetime. That means light from the voorwerp is a bit like a biography of the quasar, […] There's even a voorwerp project, and the Zooites have successfully hunted down several more voorwerps. In all, Galaxy Zoo has been used to write 22 scientific papers, on a wide variety of topics, and many more papers are on the way.

   2020 April 7, Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, pages 132, 140

   Synonyms: voorwerpje, Voorwerpje