Courtesy of NASA
Posted on 09/21/2013 10:32:43 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have solved a 40-year mystery on the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around our Milky Way galaxy.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are at the head of the gaseous stream. Since the stream's discovery by radio telescopes in the early 1970s, astronomers have wondered whether the gas comes from one or both of the satellite galaxies. New Hubble observations reveal most of the gas was stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud about two billion years ago, and a second region of the stream originated more recently from the Large Magellanic Cloud.
A team of astronomers, led by Andrew J. Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, determined the source of the gas filament by using Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to measure the amount of heavy elements, such as oxygen and sulfur, at six locations along the Magellanic Stream. They observed faraway quasars, the brilliant cores of active galaxies that emit light that passes through the stream. They detected the heavy elements from the way the elements absorb ultraviolet light.
Fox's team found a low amount of oxygen and sulfur along most of the stream, matching the levels in the Small Magellanic Cloud about two billion years ago, when the gaseous ribbon is thought to have formed. In a surprising twist, the team discovered a much higher level of sulfur in a region of the stream that is closer to the Magellanic Clouds.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificcomputing.com ...
Courtesy of NASA
Astronomy Picture of the Day — The Magellanic Stream
NASA | August 15, 2013 | (see photo credit)
Posted on Fri Aug 16 07:07:16 2013 by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3055369/posts
Those kinds of things are plasma phenomena, and not gas.
Not enough or remotely close to enough to contain gas in one place.
Plasma is gas.
Pink Slime takes Over The Earth! :-)
Well, if it dates back 2 billion years, that means Ferdinand Magellan is off the hook, but they don’t define what they mean by “more recently” so George W. Bush may be to blame for that.
There are clouds of gas throughout space. Where do you think it’s going to go?
Sulfur.
They discovered the location of H*ll. Now they know where Obama is from.
and they STILL want to defund Hubble... feh
Obviously it's a greenhouse gas causing cosmic warming. The EPA should get involved and regulate the universe into entropy ;-)
Plasma is a fourth state of matter.
As long as they defund it after they get the Webb Space Telescope in orbit.
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
yeah, but they've wanted to let it die for years, and it's still making fools of them
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