I’m delighted to announce that the fifth Galaxy Zoo paper - the one that discusses Hanny’s Voorwerp - has now been accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It’s somewhat of a relief to say that, as it was way back in August of last year that we first submitted it. The referee was extremely thorough, catching a few stupid mistakes we’d made (as a good referee should) and in correcting these and responding to responses for clarification the paper grew from four pages to thirteen. The basic story is still the one that Bill and I outlined more than a year ago - we think we’re seeing the result of activity associated with the black hole in the nearby galaxy IC2497 which has now ceased.

Along the way, another team of astronomers have published a paper about their radio observations of the Voorwerp; I’ll blog later in the week about how we think the two sets of observations are compatible. Hopefully they’ll do the same, and we can have a discussion in public about what we do - and don’t - agree on. By coincidence, their paper is being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics this week - and their image of the Voorwerp made the front cover of the printed edition. We’ll have an image of that for you as soon as anyone involved can find a printed edition - a rare thing in this internet age.

Update : Paper is now available here.

P.S. For those keeping score, our Voorwerp paper was the 5th to be submitted, but the 6th to be accepted.

Update: The pre-print is available on astro-ph now.

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Our own paper covering the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp is still working it’s way through the refereeing process. We’ve come up against a referee who really understands the subject and it’s taking time to put right our numerous missteps and to make everything clear. A new version will be submitted in the next couple of days, so hopefully you’ll be able to read it soon.

In the meantime, a group of Dutch radio astronomers have published a paper reporting their own results which is accepted and available online. They were kind enough to discuss it with us, and add some of the team to the list of authors - and they’ll be blogging here next week to tell you about what they’ve done.

It still hurts to be beaten to publication, but at least they’re friendly and it’s another sign of how this remarkable object has captured people’s attention.

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The Object of the Day thread on the forums is always worth watching, but today’s is particularly good. Jules explains what the mysterious object that forms the ‘O’ in the Galaxy Zoo logo is - and if you don’t know already, you might be surprised to find it isn’t a galaxy…

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I thought I’d go for a slightly different top 10 this week. Zoo users are distributed all over the world - in more than 170 countries, in fact - but some places have more than others. I present, therefore, this week’s top 10 most zooite filled cities :

1. London - No surprise here given where the launch of both Zoo 1 and Zoo 2 took place

2. Manchester - Are the good folk at Jodrell Bank spending all their time on the Zoo?

3. Birmingham  - Long running astronomy program the Sky at Night is based up here, so perhaps this is what they do the rest of the month.

4. New York - Now we know why the city never sleeps

5. Bristol - A sudden rush up the charts in recent weeks; I’m taking the credit as I talked there a few weeks ago. (Edit : Of course I should have mentioned the sterling efforts by Alice and Rick who gave talks there this year too.)

6. Portland - Why Oregon? I’m struggling here, because all I know about Portland is that it has a football team. According to Wikipedia, its nicknames include Stumptown.

7. Sydney - Our friends from Down Under are obviously taking a break from being unfeasibly good at sport

8. Glasgow - Being an astronomer in Glasgow must be tough with that climate. No wonder they turn to Galaxy Zoo

9. Orlando - Shouldn’t they be concentrating on building and launching spacecraft?

10. Colchester - Is this the place with the highest population of Zooites per capita? A town in Essex, Colchester was the capital of Roman Britain. They grow good oysters, too.

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We’re now 50 hours into the 100 hours of astronomy, and we’re well on course to hit Galaxy Zoo’s target of a million galaxies in 100 hours. The Zoonometer &trade clicked over 700,000 galaxies this morning which is an incredible response to our call - but not yet good enough!

Keep clicking to get us over the line…

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