Everything about this strange phenomenon is cool. There's the Dutch school teacher who discovered it (Hanny), the name of the anomaly, which is based on the Dutch word for 'object' (voorwerp), and the liberal use of words like continuum, galactic nuclei, and photoionization in William C. Keel's summary:
At this point, we know that the object is rich in highly ionized gas. There is continuum light, especially at the northern tip, but the emission lines are so strong that we can as yet say little about its continuum structure. The high ionization might suggest shock ionization or photoionization by an active galactic nuclei, which would have to be much brighter than any we see in the neighborhood.Link.
