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Astronomers Spot a Strange Space Cloud Screeching Through Our Galaxy

posted by on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the alien-spaceship dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

While focussing on the remains of an exploded star roughly 10,000 light-years away, a team of Japanese astronomers have stumbled across a mysterious cloud of molecules tearing through the Milky Way. So quickly, in fact, they've nick-named [...] the unknown phenomenon the 'Bullet'.

The cause of this cloud's ridiculous speed isn't clear, but so far all signs suggest it's been sent hurtling through space thanks to a rogue black hole.

On account of their light-sucking talent, black holes aren't known for being all that easy to spot. They sometimes reveal themselves by stealing material from a nearby star, heating it up and forcing it to emit X-rays.

If they're wandering alone in interstellar space, however, they tend to remain hidden.

Yet in this case, the shadowy influence of a black hole could explain why a cloud of molecules 2 light-years in size was moving forward at 120 kilometres per second (75 miles per second), and expanding at 50 kilometres per second (31 miles per second).

Weirder still, it was moving against the direction of the Milky Way's spin.

Source: http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-find-hints-of-a-black-hole-powered-supersonic-space-cloud

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:16AM

    by anubi (2828) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:16AM (#464485) Journal

    If the end result of star fusion is mostly iron, and some stars explode when done, it only seems to me that there are likely areas of space filled with lots of left-over rock fragments loosely held together by gravity, but kept separated by the rotational inertia/centrifugal force of the donor star that died to make them. Kinda like interstellar swarm of bees. Bees easily the size of earth. Dark and cold.

    All orbiting around the common center of mass, and each other, kinda like the rings of Saturn, sans Saturn.

    Due to their non-emittance of light, and sparse nature, I believe they would be very hard to detect, and we would likely intercept a swarm of them before we were aware of their existence. I would kinda expect the diameter of the swarm to be roughly in line with the diameter of our solar system as bounded by Pluto or maybe the OORT cloud.

    But this is all speculation/imagination of what might be. Anyone else thinking along those lines?

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @12:17PM (#464506)
    The thing is, the debris after a star explodes has its own gravity as well, and because of gravity it will tend to coalesce to form actual planets, unless it’s inside the stellar remnant’s Roche limit, which is actually not that big. For a neutron star and rocky stuff that’s something like a million kilometres. Not exactly far from a star system perspective, and such a ring system will tend to be unstable and quickly fall into the remnant with just a little perturbation.