Bizarre cloud of gas is one of the longest structures in the Milky Way
By Harry Baker published about 8 hours ago
Both its size and composition are very unusual.
This image shows a section of the side view of the Milky Way as measured by ESA’s Gaia satellite. The dark band consists of gas and dust, which dims the light from the embedded stars. The Galactic Centre of the Milky Way is indicated on the right of the image, shining brightly below the dark zone. The box to the left of the middle marks the location of the “Maggie” gas cloud. (Image credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO & T. Müller/J. Syed/MPIA)
Astronomers have discovered what may be the longest structure in the Milky Way: an unusual cloud of hydrogen.
The gigantic structure, which is more than 3,900 light-years long and around 150 light-years wide, is located roughly 55,000 light-years away from the solar system, according to a statement by researchers. (Previously, the largest known clouds of gas in the Milky Way were thought to be about 800 light-years across.) The team named the lengthy cloud "Maggie," which is short for the Magdalena River, the longest river in Colombia.
Astronomers discovered the cloud as part of The HI/OH/Recombination line survey of the Milky Way (THOR). The survey, which relies on data collected by the radio observatory called the Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, looks for objects outside the main plane of the Milky Way, which is the flattened disk where most matter in the galaxy is found. Because Maggie is located outside that plane, the structure was much easier to spot than it normally would have been.
"We don't yet know exactly how it got there," Jonas Syed, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany, said in a statement. "But the filament [gas cloud] extends about 1,600 light-years below the Milky Way plane." Therefore, the radiation from the hydrogen is clearly visible without any real interference, he added.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/longest-structure-in-milky-way
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