High-Speed Crash Makes Hot, 'Sterile' Galaxies

Discovery News ^ | Thursday, October 9, 2008 | Larry O'Hanlon

[SunkenCiv]

A new wider view of two very well-known galaxies has revealed a big surprise: They are connected by faint, starless filaments of hydrogen gas which trace back to a very high-speed intergalactic collision. The smash-up between galaxies M86 and NGC4438 not been suspected before, and may explain why M86, which is visible to the naked eye, is unable to give birth to new stars... During galactic smash-ups stars rarely collide, since there is so much space between them. But gases do slam into gases. The faster the collision, the higher the temperature the gases reach. In the case of M86, its gases are millions of degrees and radiate in X-rays. Until now, however, there was no easy explanation for all this blistering hot gas. The new evidence of M86's collision may solve that mystery. What's more, the super-hot gas also probably explains why M86 is unable to produce new stars. To make stars you need colossal clouds of frigid gas that will collapse to begin star-producing nuclear reactions... [page 2] Keel said he is hoping Kenney and his colleagues will search for more telltale gas filaments between other galaxies in the Virgo cluster, where both M86 and NGC 4438 reside. M86 is the brightest galaxy in the Virgo cluster, a neighbor galaxy cluster about 50 million light-years away from our own Local Group cluster.

[Fred Nerks]

...With the discovery of quasars, magnetic binaries, black holes and colliding galaxies sending out agonized radio signals, the electromagnetic nature of the universe is no more in question. Space is not empty either. I feel like calling René Descartes from the Land of Shades to present his appeal, because as late as 1949, a year before the publication of Worlds in Collision, the verdict was, according to the philosopher Butterfield, that “The clean and comparatively empty Newtonian skies ultimately carried the day against a Cartesian universe packed with matter and agitated with whirlpools, for the existence of which scientific observation provided no evidence.”

But ten years later we read: “Gone forever is any earthbound notion of space as a serene thoroughfare . . . . a fantastic amount of cosmic traffic (hot gaseous clouds, deadly rays, bands of electricity) rushes by at high speed, circles, crisscrosses, and collides.”

How could I produce this score of correct prognostications? Professor V. Eshleman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, obviously astounded, wrote on September II, 1970, to a news-writer— “I am completely mystified as to how Velikovsky reaches his conclusions. It is almost as though he does it through will power alone. . . .” But could I, by will power alone, initiate Jupiter’s noises?

There is no mystery. My advance claims are a “natural fallout from a single central idea,” in the words of one student of the affair. Reading of my work is a prerequisite for understanding the way I reach my conclusions...

http://www.varchive.org/lec/aaas/challenge.htm