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Pill-popping galaxy hooked on gas

Date:
November 25, 2013
Source:
CSIRO Australia
Summary:
Our Galaxy may have been swallowing "pills" -- clouds of gas with a magnetic wrapper -- to keep making stars for the past eight billion years.
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FULL STORY

"Food pills" were a staple of science fiction for decades. For our Galaxy, they may be real.

The Galaxy has been making stars for the last 8 billion years. What's kept it going all that time?

When old stars die, some of their gas goes back into the galactic "soup" for star making. But in the long run a lot of it gets locked up in long-lived dwarf stars.

So the Galaxy needs fresh supplies of gas.

Astronomer think that gas rains in from intergalactic space, probably in the form of "clouds," and that this fuels the star-making.

But there's a problem.

If a regular gas cloud were to hit the warm outer parts of the Galaxy -- the halo -- the gas would dissipate, and not reach the Galaxy's starry disk where the party is going on.

Something must hold the gas clouds together on their way to the Galaxy's digestive system.

CSIRO astronomer Alex Hill and his colleagues think they have the answer.

These researchers have been studying a gas cloud falling into the Galaxy -- a big one, called the Smith Cloud, after the woman who discovered it -- and have found it has a magnetic field.

The field is weak, about 0.002% of the strength of Earth's.

But the astronomers think it's strong enough to hold the cloud together, so that it can deliver its payload of gas into the Galaxy's disk.

The Cloud's like a coated aspirin tablet that goes through your stomach undigested, then releases its contents when it hits your intestine.

Also known as Smith's Cloud, it's one of thousands of high-velocity clouds of hydrogen gas flying around the outskirts of our Galaxy.

Astronomers think their origins are mixed, some stemming from burst "bubbles" in the gas of our Galaxy, some being primordial gas, and some associated with small galaxies our Galaxy's gravity is shredding from a distance. The Smith Cloud is probably either semi-primordial gas condensing from the halo of our Galaxy or gas stripped from another galaxy.


Story Source:

Materials provided by CSIRO Australia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Alex S. Hill, S. A. Mao, Robert A. Benjamin, Felix J. Lockman, Naomi M. McClure-Griffiths. MAGNETIZED GAS IN THE SMITH HIGH VELOCITY CLOUD. The Astrophysical Journal, 2013; 777 (1): 55 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/777/1/55

Cite This Page:

CSIRO Australia. "Pill-popping galaxy hooked on gas." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 November 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131125101209.htm>.
CSIRO Australia. (2013, November 25). Pill-popping galaxy hooked on gas. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 19, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131125101209.htm
CSIRO Australia. "Pill-popping galaxy hooked on gas." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131125101209.htm (accessed March 19, 2024).

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