Cosmic Cloud on Collision Course

ScienceNOW Daily News ^ | 11 January 2008 | Govert Schilling

[placerville]

AUSTIN, TEXAS--It's large, it's fast, and it's heading toward the Milky Way

[placerville]

need i say any more..we are all freaking doomed.

[neodad]

It’ll be after the football games today, right?

[BipolarBob]

We need AlBore to write a new book and collect another prize and last but not least blame Bush and tax the crap out of the American people.

[Red_Devil 232]

Calling Captin Kirk!

[Mr. Brightside]

Worlds are colliding!

[Alright_on_the_LeftCoast]

Let’s see....40 million years from now...I would suggest a repost in about 40,002,000 AD.....

[davisfh]

I’m ready. Lets all pull our heads down between our legs and kiss it goodbye.

[Aristotelian]

BBC News reports: giant cloud of hydrogen gas is racing towards a collision with the Milky Way, astronomers have announced.

Smith’s Cloud, as it is known, may set off spectacular fireworks when it smacks into our galaxy in 20-40 million years.

It contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun, say experts, and its leading edge is already hitting gas from our galaxy.

When it does hit, the cloud could indeed set off a new burst of star formation in the Milky Way.

Details of the work, by a team at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, were unveiled at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

[To Hell With Poverty]

ping!

[RepublitarianRoger2]

I’m still trying to visualize how a cloud of hydrogen gas — even one that is moving at 250 kilometers/sec — can “smash” into anything.

[FreePaul]

Time to subscribe to survival magazines and start stocking supplies.

[xcamel]

related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1952606/posts

[Zakeet]

The 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia made a discovery which may have some benefit to U.S. taxpayers in only 40,000,000 years.

In other words, the Grand Kleagle finally came up with some useful pork.

I think I'm about to faint.

[Old Professer]

Hydrogen, hydrogen everywhere, and not a drop to burn...

[GraniteStateConservative]

It’ll be after the football games today, right?

The Cosmic Cloud is just a '72 Dolphins fan that doesn't want the Pats to go 19-0.

[randog]

Well, there’s our unlimited supply of hydrogen; we just have to figure out how to harvest it...

[razorback-bert]

I should get a new HD video camera for this.

[gusopol3]

100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia

this cloud of hot gas (probably a lot of methane and sulfides) is already here, why wait 40 million years? Really, has the man no shame?

[Larry Lucido]

I never trust galactic weather predictions. Last time they predicted giant hydrogen clouds, it turned out to be sunny all day.

[Larry Lucido]

Be just our luck, in 39,999,999 years we will have just discovered a way to create hydrogen synthetically.