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| Study reveals gas clouds between Andromeda, Triangulum |
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 Star production just isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the universe’s fault, necessarily, there just isn’t as much raw material left for stellar nurseries to work with. In fact, according to Robert Braun, an astronomer at the Australia Telescope National Facility in Epping, New South Wales, “stellar birthrates these days are less than 10 percent of what they were” at their peak 10-11 billion years ago.
Still, spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way Galaxy and nearby Andromeda Galaxy and Triangulum Galaxy continue to churn out stars. Given the lack of available fuel out there, where are they finding the energy to do it? According to a recent article by Pete Spotts in The Christian Science Monitor, there is new evidence that bridges of ionized hydrogen gas that are found between galaxies can serve as fuel for new stars.
Potts further explains that this type of hydrogen gas found between galaxies was studied using a radio-telescope “with a 100-meter-wide dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory‘s Greenbank facility in West Virginia.” These devices are used to pick up faint levels of radiation and can tell scientists a great deal about the behavior of galaxies. The hydrogen bridge that the Greenbank team were able to detect appears between the Milky Way’s nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy. While Andromeda is about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, the Triangulum is approximately 3 million light-years away.
The true star-making potential rests within giant blobs of hydrogen that are contained within the hydrogen bridge itself. Within the neutral hydrogen dispersed in the larger stream of ionized hydrogen, the team found seven blobs that range in size from about 7,800 light-years across to 20,900 light-years across and contain gas supplies that could form between 40,000 and 400,000 suns (Potts).
So what causes these blobs to form? Braun suggests that one possible explanation could be a filament of dark matter within the hydrogen bridge itself. Though dark matter cannot be detected directly, it’s gravitational influence on nearby matter can be measured. Dark matter would create the highly pressurized conditions necessary to squeeze hydrogen into a blob light years across.
Indeed, Potts surmises that “if such bridges and clumps are common, they could help explain why stars continue to form in galaxies that, if left to their own resources, should have run out of gas long ago.”
(Source: Space Recorder)
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