Ah, one of my favourite stories of summer, involving Brian May, a school teacher and a mysterious astronomical object is now warming my heart again in these cold and gloomy winter months.

Yes, Hanny’s Voorwerp is back! And this time science can explain it.

Remember if you will the Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, drawn to astronomy by the plucky plectrum antics of Brian May, Queen guitarist. Remember, too, van Arkel’s discovery of her very own astronomical “object”, (or voorwerp in Dutch) which she found as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Hanny’s Voorwerp was something that looked like a galaxy, was full of hot gas but contained no stars, and was a complete mystery.

Well since then, astronomers, both professional and amateur, including van Arkel, have trained the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, in the Netherlands, on the Voorwerp. And what did they find? A massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy known as IC2497 is spewing out lots of very energetic particles. (press release) This jet stream clears a channel through the foggy interstellar dust. "This cleared channel permits the beam of intense optical and ultraviolet emission associated with the black hole, to illuminate a small part of a large gas cloud that partially surrounds the galaxy. The optical and ultraviolet emission heats and ionises the gas cloud, thus creating the phenomena known as Hanny’s voorwerp,” says Mike Garrett from Leiden University, who led the charge.

The team still aren’t entirely sure about where the stream of gas comes from in the first place, but they claim to be making progress.

The news has been picked up in places, but I want to direct you to my favourite headline, in Space Daily: Bizarre giant green cloud. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Picture: Dan Smith, Peter Herbert, Matt Jarvis & the ING