Posted on 05/11/2010 7:05:39 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
A vast hole in space has been unexpectedly discovered in a part of the universe thought to be packed with a cloud of dense gas and dust – the latest in a string of cosmic finds by the European Herschel infrared space telescope.
The surprising hole in space has provided astronomers with a new glimpse at the end of the star-forming process.
...
Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas, and while jets of gas have been spotted coming from young stars, the process of how a star uses this gas to disperse surrounding debris and emerge from its birth cloud has not been understood.
This latest discovery by Herschel, an infrared space telescope built by the European Space Agency, may be an unexpected step in the star-forming process.
A cloud of bright, reflective gas, known to astronomers as NGC 1999, is located next to a black patch of sky. For most of the 20th century, these black patches were understood to be dense clouds of dust and gas that block light that would normally pass through.
As Herschel's infrared eye looked in the direction of NGC 1999 to study nearby young stars, the cloud continued to look black, even though the telescope's infrared technology is designed to penetrate through such dense cloud material. This meant that either the cloud was immensely dense, or Herschel had happened upon a previously unexplained phenomenon.
Astronomers continued their investigation using ground-based telescopes and found the same results when looking at the patch of gas. This led to the conclusion that the patch looks black not because it is an extremely dense pocket of gas, but because it is truly empty – something had blown a hole through the cloud.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Check this out..
Hubble Catches Heavyweight Runaway Star Speeding from 30 Doradus
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/14/
May 11, 2010: A blue-hot star, 90 times more massive than our Sun, is hurtling across space fast enough to make a round trip from Earth to the Moon in merely two hours. Though the speed is not a record-breaker, it is unique to find a homeless star that has traveled so far from its nest. The only way the star could have been ejected from the star cluster where it was born is through a tussle with a rogue star that entered the binary system where the star lived, which ejected the star through a dynamical game of stellar pinball. This is strong circumstantial evidence for stars as massive as 150 times our Sun’s mass living in the cluster. Only a very massive star would have the gravitational energy to eject something weighing 90 solar masses. The runaway star is on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus nebula, a raucous stellar breeding ground in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The finding bolsters evidence that the most massive stars in the local universe reside in 30 Doradus, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, is roughly 170,000 light-years from Earth.
bump
Seems to be two holes there.
One to the right of the ‘green’ star and one to the right of the star below it.
There are a lot of a holes in Washington DC. And all have blown a lot of gas around the country.
Then you have my explicit permission to use it.
I won’t charge you a thing! ;^p
Stargate?
whats it running away from do they say?
Only Conservatives know about it.
Liberals still think it's a hole in the ozone.
It’s God’s office, the rest of the Universe is His desk lamp...
That's where memory (where we are) connects to the other parts in God's computer.
Oooobama farted! Hallelllujjaahhhh!
If you were in the middle of that “hole” you wouldn’t even know it was there. Only distance, perspective and long film/CCD exposure lets you see it at all.
I like that analogy
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