A Cosmic Mystery: Why is the Milky Way Galaxy Getting Gassier? [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Chelsea Gohd 13 hours ago

There seems to be an imbalance in our galaxy.



This illustration shows gas rising and falling in and out of the Milky Way galaxy using Hubble's COS
instrument. With 10 years of data from COS, astronomers have found that there is more gas
coming into our galaxy than leaving it. (Image: © NASA, ESA, and D. Player (STScI))

Astronomers have discovered a strange surplus of gas in the Milky Way galaxy.

Using 10 years of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the team of astronomers concluded that there is more gas coming into our galaxy than leaving it. Rather than an equilibrium of gas entering and escaping, there is a significant imbalance, though the team behind this finding has not yet found the source for this gaseous disparity.

The researchers used data from Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), which allows the space telescope to study objects that absorb or emit light and determine aspects such as their temperature, chemical makeup, velocity and density. With COS, the team could observe and track the movement of gases in the galaxy: the gases appear redder as they move away from our galaxy, and bluer as they get closer through the phenomena known as redshift and blueshift.

This allowed the researchers to see that there was more "blue" (entering) gas than "red" (exiting) gas. Although the researchers have not pinpointed the source of this imbalance, they think that it could possibly be caused by one of three things.

More:
https://www.space.com/astronomy-mystery-milky-way-galaxy-gas-imbalance.html