( CNN ) -- Hanny van Arkel was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet in August 2007 when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky : a bright , gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle . Hanny van Arkel made her discovery by poring over images of galaxies on an astronomy Web site . `` It looked a bit like an irregular galaxy , but I was n't sure what it was , '' Van Arkel said . So she posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project , which encourages members of the public to join in astronomy research online . Van Arkel is a 25-year-old schoolteacher in Heerlen , The Netherlands , not an astrophysicist . But her startling find -- a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a `` cosmic ghost '' -- has captivated astronomers and even caught the attention of the people who run the Hubble Space Telescope , who have agreed to take a closer look next year . `` This discovery really shows how citizen science has come of age in the Internet world , '' said Bill Keel , professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama and a Galaxy Zoo team member . `` There was a time when I spoke pejoratively of armchair astronomers . And I 've gotten up at a star party and publicly apologized for that . '' Not so long ago , the term `` amateur astronomer '' conjured images of stargazers peering through backyard telescopes . But today 's are as likely to be analyzing reams of sophisticated data collected by observatories and posted on space-related Web sites . Armchair observers like van Arkel increasingly are making significant contributions to science , said Steve Maran , spokesman for the American Astronomical Society , a group of 6,500 professionals . Amateurs have been invited to present papers at recent AAS conferences , `` which would n't have happened years ago , '' he said . A successful example of amateur-professional collaboration , the Galaxy Zoo project was launched last year by Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott at the University of Oxford in England . The pair were looking for help in cataloging archived photographs of galaxies -- one million images -- taken by the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in remote southern New Mexico . Knowing that the human eye is sometimes more sensitive than a computer at picking out unusual patterns -- and that they did n't have time to do all the work themselves -- Schawinski and Lintott posted the images on the Galaxy Zoo Web site last summer . The professors then invited amateur astronomers , with the help of a brief online tutorial , to classify the galaxies as spiral , elliptical or something else . Online galaxy-sorting might not sound as fun as , say , surfing YouTube , but it was an immediate hit . `` We were overwhelmed by the response . It completely melted the server , '' Schawinski said . `` People tell us it 's addictive . Some of [ the volunteers ] are professional astronomers , but most of them are not . They 're just regular people who got excited about the project . '' During the past year , more than 150,000 armchair astronomers from all over the world volunteered their time , submitting more than 50 million classifications . The public 's collective wisdom -- the same principle that guides jury trials or Wikipedia -- proved remarkably astute , Schawinski said . For example , if 33 of 36 volunteers thought a galaxy appeared elliptical , then astronomers could be confident the classification was correct , he said . Van Arkel had been classifying photos on Galaxy Zoo for about a week when she came across the image that quickly became known as `` Hanny 's Voorwerp , '' Dutch for `` object . '' The primary school teacher does not own a telescope -- `` my [ astronomy ] background does n't really go further than looking at the stars when walking outside in the evening , '' she said -- but when she posted her finding August 13 on the Galaxy Zoo forum , the astronomers who run the site began to investigate . They soon realized van Arkel might have found a new class of astronomical object . The Galaxy Zoo team asked scientists working at telescopes around the world to take a look at the mysterious Voorwerp . Their best guess : The Voorwerp is probably a cloud of hot gas punctured by a central hole 16,000 light years across and illuminated by the `` dying embers '' of a nearby quasar , Schawinski said . Quasars are distant , highly luminous astronomical objects powered by black holes ; scientists suspect that light from the quasar still illuminates the Voorwerp even though the quasar itself burned out in the past 100,000 years . `` It 's this light echo that has been frozen in time for us to observe , '' said Lintott , the Oxford scientist . `` It 's rather like examining the scene of a crime where , although we ca n't see them , we know the culprit must be lurking somewhere nearby in the shadows . '' Galaxy Zoo leaders are eagerly awaiting images from NASA 's orbiting Hubble , which is scheduled to train its powerful instruments on the Voorwerp in 2009 . In the meantime , van Arkel is enjoying the fuss over her contribution to astronomy . `` It 's amazing to think that ... amateur volunteers can help by spotting things like this online , '' she said . `` What excites me the most is that all of this leads to more interest in science . ''
Using the Web , a Dutch schoolteacher has discovered a strange astronomical object . The find illustrates how more amateur astronomers are contributing to science . The Galaxy Search project encourages the public to participate in astronomy research online . Hubble Space Telescope has agreed to take a closer look at the object next year .