British aeronautical engineer was playing around with the new Google Earth 5.0, which includes undersea data, and noticed something funny off the coast of Africa, about 600 miles west of the Canary Islands, that resembled a pattern of a street grid.
Google, however, is officially denying the widespread Internet rumors. A statement in Google read, “in this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
Hanny van Arkel, a 25 year old school teacher, was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet last August when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky: a bright, gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle.
Van Arkel posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project, which encourages members of the public to join in astronomy research online.
Galaxy Zoo astronomers are now researching what may be a new class of astronomical object.
Click here to read more about this mysterious vortex and how you can be an astronomer on-line.
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