Monstrous gas cloud to smash into Milky
Way Galaxy with ‘spectacular burst’
The Smith Cloud, a high-velocity cloud of hydrogen gas “is
plummeting toward our galaxy at nearly 700,000 miles per hour,” said
the team of astronomers who have been working with the Hubble Space Telescope
said..
The cloud,
supposedly coming from the outer regions of the galactic disk where it originated
about 70 million years ago, was discovered in the 1960s by doctoral astronomy
student Gail Smith.
The “apocalypse” it brings is not going to happen
tomorrow – the scientists found out that the cloud is expected to plow into the
Milky Way's disk in some 30 million years.
When the collision takes place, it “will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation, perhaps providing enough gas to make 2 million suns,” the astronomers say.
When the collision takes place, it “will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation, perhaps providing enough gas to make 2 million suns,” the astronomers say.
"The cloud is an example of how the galaxy is changing with
time," Andrew Fox, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, Maryland, said. "It's telling us that the Milky Way is
a bubbling, very active place where gas can be thrown out of one part of the
disk and then return back down into another."
And the cloud is
really monstrous even up to space standards – the comet-shaped region of gas in
the cloud is about 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years across.
“If the cloud could be seen in visible light, it would
span the sky with an apparent diameter 30 times greater than the size of the
full moon,” astronomers
say.
While the cloud is heading to our galaxy with monstrous
speed (and probably monstrous intentions), the scientists try to unravel the
mystery of the phenomenon. The researchers wonder how the cloud got to “where it is now” or what exactly catapulted it out of
the Milky way.
Photo Courtesy: NASA, HUB TELESCOPE.
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