I have expected to find many additional proto galaxies that just have
not fully coalesced as yet. It appears we are now developing the
ability to find them. Other explanations are been suggested, but
the process of coalescence is sufficient to produce plenty of new
galaxies on a continuing basis.
It also confirms that intergalactic matter is conforming to the idea
of an homogenous initial state if this all holds up.
At least we now know that massive amounts of hydrogen is out there in
interstellar space.
Mysterious
hydrogen clouds detected in space, puzzling scientists
By Deborah Netburn
May 8, 2013
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-hydrogen-clouds-space-mystery-20130507,0,5009214.story
Here's a new mystery
for space observers: Astronomers have recently discovered a series of
hydrogen clouds floating in a starless stretch of space between the
Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.
The clouds are
enormous, or relatively small, depending on your reference point.
They are much smaller than the two galaxies they lie between, but
each of the clouds is itself a million times the mass of our solar
system. Researchers say the clouds are roughly the size of dwarf
galaxies, but they don't have any stars in them.
"What makes this
discovery especially puzzling is you have these apparently
free-floating clouds in intergalactic space whose origin is a
complete mystery," said Felix J. Lockman, an astronomer at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory who helped discover them. "We
don't know how long they have been around, or where they came from,
or where they will end up in the end."
Photos: Amazing images
from space
The clouds don't emit
light or energy, but the neutral atomic hydrogen that they are made
of gives off a distinct radio signal that astronomers were able to
pick up using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope
which measures radio waves.
About 10 years ago,
astronomers in Europe surveyed this same stretch of space and thought
they noticed a large reservoir of hydrogen gas between the two
galaxies, but the signal was so faint that they couldn't be sure.
Since then, the highly
sensitive Green Bank Telescope has brought the region into focus,
allowing scientists to see that there is definitively hydrogen gas,
and that it has clumped together into distinct blobs. The findings
were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Now there are a lot
more questions to answer: Did these clouds condense out of a hotter
gas that we can't see? Were they pulled tidally from the Andromeda
galaxy by another galaxy passing by, or will they eventually be
cannibalized by the Andromeda galaxy and processed into stars?
Are massive
hydrogen blobs common in starless patches of universe and we have
just never discovered them before because we haven't had good enough
telescopes?
"Our next plan is
to use the same telescope to look at other places and see if there is
more of these clouds," Lockman told the Los Angeles Times. "If
they were pulled tidally from Andromeda then we may find others along
a trail leading back to it."
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