Comic Book to Share True Tale of Strange Space Object

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Swing on this news, Spider-Man. Dick Tracy, your wristwatch has a message for you. Superman, return to your phone booth at once. 

The world’s best known comic book characters should take note. There’s a crop of new faces coming soon to colorized panels and speech bubbles near you. A cast of real-life astronomers and a Dutch schoolteacher who collaborated in the discovery and analysis of an unusual object in space are featured in a comic book to be unveiled Sept. 3 in Atlanta. 

The unveiling at DragonCon, an annual event dubbed as the world’s largest fantasy/science fiction convention, will showcase, in comic book form, the winding, unlikely tale of an object that came to be known as Hanny’s Voorwerp.  

“A big idea in doing this is to give a peek under the hood at how science works,” said Dr. William Keel, professor of astronomy at The University of Alabama.

Dr. Pamela Gay, an assistant research professor of astronomy at Southern Illinois University, and Keel were awarded funding by NASA, through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, to develop a public outreach effort in conjunction with the discovery. The comic book is the result.

Writers for the comic book, titled “Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp,” were recruited at CONvergence, a three-day fantasy and science fiction conference in Bloomington, Minn. last month.

In the summer of 2007, Hanny van Arkel, a primary schoolteacher from the Netherlands, came across the image of a strange gaseous object with a hole in the center while using Galaxy Zoo, a website that enables members of the general public to take part in astronomy research.

After seeing the oddly colored blob of gas and posting “What is the stuff?” on the site’s online forum, professional astronomers became interested in the unusual object. Later, astronomers, led by Keel, were awarded time on the Hubble Space Telescope to further analyze the object. Results from that analysis will be announced in coming months.   

Edited by Kelly McCullough and Gay and written by Mike Beatini, Keel, Mike Schoenberg and Jason and Jodi Thibeault, the comic book’s line art is by Elea Braasch, and its colorist and letterer is Chris Spangler.

About 500 copies of the comic book are being printed with others available for order. Anyone interested will be able to read the comic book online at http://hannysvoorwerp.zooniverse.org  beginning at 10 p.m. Sept. 3.