There is a flood of burning nuclear wind flowing from the center of our galaxy, and astronomers have discovered two small islands of unborn baby stars caught in the riptide.
These two hunks of cosmic driftwood are actually cold-cold clouds of hydrogen gas, each as frigid as Pluto (about minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 240 degrees Celsius) and carrying the mass of more than 200 senses. In calmer water, they could be stellar childbirths – those ultra-dense gas clouds where molecules can bundle into stars. However, the sore winds of the galactic center seem to have other plans for them, a new study published August 19 in the journal Nature suggereart.
The “small spheres” fly away from the galactic center, the two small gas clouds appear to collide with hotter, energetic winds from the heart of the galaxy, according to the study. This persistent collision threatens to completely dismantle the gas clouds, drowning out their star-forming potential.
Related: 11 fascinating facts about our Milky Way system
“Galaxies can be really good at shooting themselves in the foot,” study co-author Naomi McClure-Griffiths, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University (ANU), said in a statement. “If you expel a lot of mass, you lose some material that could be used to form stars, and if you lose enough of it, the galaxy can no longer form stars.”
Cold gas clouds are rare in the modern Milky Way, and especially within the large central domain of the galaxy’s core winds, the researchers said. These two gas clouds sit at the base of of Fermi Bubbles – two gargantuan orbs of hot gas and cosmic rays that tower 25,000 light-years across each side of the galactic center (by comparison, the entire Milky Way is only about 100,000 light years in diameter).
Scientists have linked the Fermi Bubbles to a powerful burst of energy from the center of the galaxy black hole, that happened millions of years ago. All these millennia later, those gaseous blobs are still very hot, measuring more than 10,000 F (5,700 C) – far too hot for star formation.
How the newly discovered gas clouds settled into those uninhabitable bubbles is still a mystery, the authors of the new study said. Elsewhere in the universe, it is not uncommon for star-forming material to be chased through space by jets from an active supermassive black hole, or to be shunted by solar winds blowing from the densely packed stars at the center of a galaxy. But the central black hole of the Milky Way has not been active for long, the researchers said, and does not yet contain enough stars near its center to make the kind of trap needed to send the gas clouds.
“We do not know what the black hole is like star formation [in the Milky Way] can produce this phenomenon, “said lead author Enrico Di Teodoro of Johns Hopkins University in the statement. We’re still looking for the smoking gun, but it’s getting more complicated the more we learn about it. “
Hopefully, further observations will discover how these cool clouds are tackled in the cosmic inferno.
Originally published on Live Science.
