Milky Way Surrounded By Humongous Halo Of Hot Gas

[n2doc]

CARL FRANZEN SEPTEMBER 24, 2012, 5:00 PM 3064
Scientists using NASA’s orbital X-ray space telescope Chandra have discovered that our own Milky Way Galaxy has a massive halo of superheated gas surrounding it, the agency announced on Monday.

It’s difficult to conceive of just how large the hot gas halo is, but NASA notes it could extend more than 300,000 light years out from its center, and have a mass equivalent between 10 billion suns and 60 billion suns, or just as many or more than all of the stars in the Milky Way itself, at a temperature “a few hundred times hotter” than the surface of our Sun (between 1 million and 2.5 million kelvin).

The hot gas halo could also help solve the great cosmic mystery of the missing baryons, or particles including protons and neutrons which ancient galaxies have in abundance and which are thought to have composed a sixth of the matter at the universe’s dawn, but which are found in about half that amount in our galaxy and its neighbors.

The newly discovered gas halo itself could be where the baryons have ended up during the course of the universe’s evolution.

more

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/milky-way-surrounded-by-humongous-halo-of-hot-gas.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

I never knew Clear Channel reached so far away!

[Raster]

1. Humongous Halo Of Hot Gas?

Rmoney must have farted.

[Xipe Totec]

2. Somebody please tell Rush to shut up. Right Fucking Now! nt

[CrazyOrangeCat]

3. Limpballs. The original gas giant.

Pride of Missouri.

Sigh.

[central scrutinizer]

4. OK, we found the baryons

but where are the morons and fignewtons

[awoke_in_2003]

7. At a Romney speaking event. nt

[Shampoobra]

5. DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE A FACE?

Because I see a face in the cloud

[tridim]

6. It's an artist's interpretation, so talk to him or her.

Our oldest probes are only barely past the edge of our dinky solar system.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. A lot of people see faces in things. It's how our brains are wired....

...wood grain in doors is a good one. There's some that look like screaming demons.

There was a show a while back, might have been one of the new Twilight Zone episodes of a woman in an insane asylum who was in a plain room and would freak out at the sight of a pattern of any kind. She relayed her story and it went back to a night when she was seeing one of those patterns that looks like a face and it suddenly looked back. It was one thing to see them but they noticed they were being seen and they saw her and were now coming to get her.

It ended with a doctor going into her room wearing a tie that had a pattern and both of them were found dead. Torn apart and the blood spattered walls had patterns that looked like faces....

Very Lovecraftian.

[Bainbridge Bear]

15. I do! I do!

Its the same face that I saw on my grilled cheese sandwich the other day -- its Jesus!

[complain jane]

8. Christie must have thrown down another 80 hot wings.

[sinkingfeeling]

10. It's 'god'!!

[mojowork_n]

11. Huh? How Hot is It???? Where?

"Halo of Hot Gas" sounds like a description of the left-over steam in a small bathroom,
after you've finished your shower.

But that can't be a very accurate comparison, because it doesn't sound like this is
your typical gas dispersion -- random, evenly distributed, more or less uniform throughout.

If that were the case, "temperature 'a few hundred times hotter' than the surface of our
Sun" would be something we would have detected by now?

So this isn't a "cloud" of gas, it's some kind of hollow, hot bubble with nothing to
see or detect anywhere near us? Only when you got out 5 or 8 times the diameter
of the Milky Way would an acute, perspicacious observer be able to notice.... *it's
hundreds of times hotter than the sun.* (YEEOW! Ouch, Ouch, Hot, Hot.)

....It's like something that could have come from a plot line in the original, 60's Star Trek.
The bubble -- a giant balloon, globule, bladder, vesicle -- of super-hot gas (with a face
on it, that talks to Kirk?) that stands as a barrier to space travel?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. Temperature measures thermal movement. It means the baryons are moving very fast though diffuse.

[mojowork_n]

20. So that's a little bit like "thermal expansion?"

A glass bottle full of water gets colder and freezes. The bottle breaks
because the water molecules

get

bigger

as they get colder. If the water in the bottle is heated instead of being cooled, the molecules

get

smaller

-- as they speed up.

....So, with these baryons being very small already (and moving with unbelievable rapidity), even if they were several orders of magnitude hotter than our sun -- nobody would notice or care. Except for physicists. Because that "halo of gas" in the artist's rendering might as well be a "tachyon burst." For all its impact on anything like 'human reality.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyons_in_fiction



Thanks for the explanation.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

21. Not like that. The case of water expanding as it goes from 4 degC to zero is almost unique

Most substances continue to contract all the way down to being frozen.

The case of thermal baryons superheated to millions of degrees simply means they have been bombarded and hit by other particles streaming out of the galaxy. Once they are hit they bounce and fly with no loss of momentum for very long distances. Furthermore, they can be hit by larger particles and end up traveling faster than the particle that hit them. They can also be prone to fissile type of reactions and to nucleonic decay ejecting neutrons and other particles.

[mojowork_n]

22. Got it, thanks.

The perspective that wasn't clearly outlined in the original post is that
the 'gas halo' -- with particles superheated to those unimaginably high
temperatures -- is the size and speed of the particles.

So if anyone -- anywhere in the whole Milky Way galaxy, or in either of
the two smaller, neighboring ones -- is concerned about an open container
of gasoline they may have, the answer would be, "not to worry."

[DallasNE]

12. This Stuff Is Interesting

What, for instance, makes these gasses super hot. How is the universe expanding, indeed, what is it expanding into. Does this mean it will eventually begin a contraction phase and will there eventually be another big bang. And how soon before the Milky Way begins its collison with a neighboring galaxy? All of that is enough to make one's head hurt.

[Bainbridge Bear]

17. Well, it has been pretty well established that our

"Milky Way" galaxy will "collide" with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in about 3-4 billion years. However, galaxies don't collide with each other in the way that objects like cars do. The distances between stars in a typical galaxy are so great that even when the collision is taking place the stars are still an average of a light year or so apart. The main changes are brought about by the gravitational effects that the two giant systems have on each other over the course of many millions of years of the interaction.
As to the "contraction" of the Universe that you speak of, it is seems less and less likely. If you want to make your head hurt think of this. Our Universe is probably a singularity. It will go on expanding and that expansion is actually accelerating until it suffers "heat death" in a trillion years. If you could come forward to that era in a time machine you would see little or no light in the sky. The stars would be too far away or burned out and the Earth would be long gone being absorbed by the Sun as it expands due to its hydrogen fuel being used up before it, too, burned out and became dark. It was comforting to think that our Universe may have the same kind of birth and death cycles as we see on Earth but it isn't so.

[harun]

13. No one can stop us, we are all made of stars

[PD Turk]

14. My God, it's full of farts!

[Bainbridge Bear]

16. There are other more localized halos of hot gas

the ones surrounding Rethug candidates as they spew their nonsense in this campaign.

[getting old in mke]

19. Uh, aether?

Maybe the 19th century scientists weren't so far off...just not on the right scale.