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Huge Hydrogen Cloud Will Hit Milky Way
diewlasing points us to a story about a hydrogen cloud, eleven thousand light-years long, which will collide with the Milky Way in a devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation...in 20-40 million years. Mark your calendars. At least it will give us something to watch while we're waiting for Andromeda to hit us in a few billion years. Hopefully, it will look at least this cool.
"The detailed GBT study dramatically changed the astronomers' understanding of the cloud. Its velocity shows that it is falling into the Milky Way, not leaving it, and the new data show that it is plowing up Milky Way gas before it as it falls. 'Its shape, somewhat similar to that of a comet, indicates that it's already hitting gas in our Galaxy's outskirts,' Lockman said. 'It is also feeling a tidal force from the gravity of the Milky Way and may be in the process of being torn apart. Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years, the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane,' Lockman explained."
Oh the hugegalaxy!
It seems to me that something with enough gas to create 1M stars akin to the Sun might have a noticeable impact on the revolutionary nature of the galaxy. Nothing astounding, probably akin to the added wobble of the Earth after the giant 2004 earthquake (the one that caused the tsunami) but it's probably something that, on the off chance we or some other life form is around, would be really awesome to observe. Also, assuming we don't have all the answers yet, seeing how the galaxy responds to such a sudden, massive change compared to our models could really tell us exactly how much mass there is, how it's distributed, etc.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Wonderful! I can just hardly wait to see this happen
Does anyone else have a problem with the word "smashing" to describe the contact of two bits of not-quite-vacuum passing through each other?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Well, the milky way does have intelligent life. Their intelligence can be seen by the fact that they didn't get in contact with us.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Lets see how the stock market and banks respond to this tomorrow. I wonder if I should pull all my savings. Jokes apart, this is interesting that they can predict with reasonable accuracy at such large time and distance scales. Do classical newtonian theories work ?
This is god's answer for all those people who said hydrogen was just an energy storage mechanism, not a solution to the energy crisis. Look, there's untold millions of barrels of the stuff headed our way!
Does anyone else have a problem with the word "smashing" to describe the contact of two bits of not-quite-vacuum passing through each other?
You mean, like a stone smashing into a window? You don't actually think the electrons or atomic nuclei of the stone actually come into contact with the electrons or atomic nuclei of the window, do you?The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's gas! It's deadly! Protect yourself! Protect your kids!
I bet quite a number of folks will stock up on gas masks when they'll hear these news...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I have already invested in a company that plans to tap this hydrogen cloud for cheap alternative hydrogen fuel. :)
Time to bring out the spaceship and start spreading humanity into the galaxy. :-)
But when the cloud hits humanity will have disappeared and diverted in so many different forms that it's probably not interesting anymore. But is humanity at it's height right now? Inhumanity sure is!
On a geological timeframe humanity is insignificant, and on a universal scale we are merely a static crack. That we still are able to fathom the scale of the events to come is still rather cool!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Hey, that's just the fuel we'll need for a Bussard ramjet
Something to watch while were waiting Duke Nukem Forever
Wait, since the Earth is only 6000 years old, how can this be possible?
/Seriously, how do religious people deal with this sort of thing?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You know what these high-fiber diets do to you.
Anybody want my mod points?
It's not a matter of coming into contact (at the smallest level, every elementary particle may well be mathematical points), but of getting close enough for an interaction force to be produced.
God wishes to extend an apology to all inhabitants of the Milky Way for the after effects of the Chilli and Beans he consumed a while ago....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
... after the cloud passes by. Hydrogen bad for health.
Yes but when will we start noticing changes, it says it already reaches the outscrirt of the Milky Way's plane. By looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way we are not that far away as 20 million years.
Reading the article, it seems like it will be a nice show, but poses little chance of danger to Earth.
Just another on a growing list. (NEOs, Gamma Ray Bursts, Rouge Black Holes, Giant Hydrogen Clouds, etc.)
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Better get a roll of duct tape and some plastic too.
We need to start building ships and load them full of our most important people. Politicians, Lawyers and phone sanitizers. It would best not to wait until the hydrogen hits these people are far too important and should be saved now! The future of our civilization depends on it!..... We'll start building ships for the rest of us when they are safely on their way.
Maybe people who don't understand what will happen will have a problem. Like the kind of people that think they will simply pass through each other. What really happens is that colliding clouds form a shock front and can heat up to millions of degrees C.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
In the field of Astronomy, 10 million years is about as negligible as the plus/minus sign.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
At least we solved the problem of where to find our hydrogen.
This along with the whole "Its velocity shows that it is falling into the Milky Way, not leaving it."
/.
That means that before this their data showed it was never going to collide. Which means that new data may show that is never going to collide, again. Nothing in the universe (or our observations of it) is quite as certain as the conclusions drawn here on
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Oh come on. By now you should know the only deadly gas is CO2.
we better start building those damn hydrogen cars...
damnit, is within the next 20 million years good enough for you?
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Except for global warming. We may have doubts about everything else, but not global warming. 'Cause Al Gore says so, and he invented the Internet and was a vice president and therefore is well qualified to know everything there is to know about the climate. :)
I'm pretty sure that was exactly his point. He's saying that an interaction force would be produced when this astronomical event occurs, therefore the word "smashing" would apply just as much as it applies when dealing with rocks and windows.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Here is just some useful unit conversations:
suns = 2E30 kg
light year = 1E16 meters
So this cloud has a density of 28 H2 molecules per liter.
That is pretty good vacuum. Actually about a million times better vacuum than "deep vacuum" in outer space here in our solar system, which again is much better vacuum than what is achievable here on earth.
So this "collision" will be quite soft in terms of energy density: One feather landing on an area the size of the earth.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
If in 20-40 million years we're still having an energy problem I'll recommend breaking out MegaMaid. Let's make sure she's set to suck (not blow) so we can collect all of this hydrogen to use in our H2 powered vehicles :)
I better get cracking on canning air to sell to the Spaceballs in payment for MegaMaids services.
If there's one thing I find more embarrassing than gas trapped in my outskirts, it's when it causes a "devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation." It's almost impossible to blame on the dog.
Don't expect to be invited to too many parties in the 20,002,007AD-40,002,007AD season.
Meh, If someone were to actually say that one would just remind them of beans =)
Ice Cream has no bones.
... light a match as the cloud goes by.
Have gnu, will travel.
.. to read about cool stuff like this but realize I'll never be around to see it. I really wish sometimes I could just sit back and watch the whole universe and not have to worry about time.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
There are four known forces in the universe, the weak and strong nuclear forces are short-range, while the electrical and gravitational forces are long-range, which means they will produce interactions everywhere in the universe.
Electrical forces come in two polarities, positive charges balance out negative charges, but gravitational forces always add up. There's no known way to block gravitation, therefore one can say that any two galaxies in the universe are "close enough for an interaction force to be produced", given enough time.
In the context of the article, I suppose "smashing" means close enough to produce significant distortion in the overall shape of the hydrogen gas cloud.
I think the question that the original poster raised is best expressed as, "can someone give a description of this 'gas cloud' in terms of average units of mass per units of volume?" And perhaps adding in "what is the total volume of this cloud, if we consider the boundary of the cloud as the zone where local mass-per-unit-volume descends to 10% of average mass-per-unit-volume?" While your point may be technically correct, talking about a temperature of millions of degrees C for such a sparse cloud would mislead exactly the same people you're feeling superior towards, and they'll assume it's some sort of intergalactic lava flow.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Just in time to fuel the "hydrogen economy"!
What!?!? The content of this stuff in fresh air already varies between 0.03% (300 ppm) and 0.06% (600 ppm), and I'm running out of duct tape! :O
Two points:
(1) The sun's outer atmosphere is already in the millions of degrees.
(2) Our planet orbits within the sun's outer atmosphere.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The detailed GBT study dramatically changed the astronomers' understanding of the cloud.
No lesbian astronomers involved in the study, then?
now it's time for the hydrogen economy!
Do you think by then we'll be able to make a black hole and shoot it in the direction of the cloud to suck it up before it hits us?
I realize there are probably other ways to keep it from hitting our solar system, but I'd like us all to agree right here and now that a black hole cannon is how we are going to deal with this, just so we're all on the same page and can get our act together in time.
Except for global warming
And that uranium can be used to create a weapon of incredible power. And that a flood in New Orleans would be really bad. And that travel to the Moon is possible.
Each of those predictions had less consensus than human-aggravated Global Warming does today. Ten years ago, maybe, you could stand by your argument. Not in 2008.
You sure it's intelligence? I can think of a more high-school scenario there. I mean, picture two fashionable grey-alien girls after a cow-tipping tour to Earth.
;)
"Oh, like, those Sol guys are, like, soo nerdy, always with their, like, radio-teles-wossnames and their gizmos. And, like, God, they just can't take a hint when they're, like, not wanted. You'd think, like, after they got ignored a dozen times, they'd, like, quit trying to get our attention already. I mean, gah, gag me with a spoon, like I'd ever want to be seen talking to some geek who's, like, fiddling knobs all day. Those SETI guys should, like, so get a _life_. I mean, like, geesh, like they'll ever get laid if they're, like, fiddling with that telescope all day. And, geesh, what's with those _clothes_? Fer crying out loud, those suits are sooo, like, last _millenium_. And have you seen those haircuts? Like, gag me with a spoon. They should, like, take a hint from those guys from Rigel. Mmm, those are soo dreamy. 'Course, I bet they don't want to be seen, like, nursing a bunch of nerds either."
Well, it's a possibility
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm pretty sure we're talking about a description of what it looks like, not the technical details of the actual physics involved -- no need to show off your knowledge of sub-atomic theory.
Global Warming Crowd
aka "folks who believe in science"
will start yammering about Galaxy Warming
It's an interesting model... there's a lot of energy in these incoming hydrogen atoms, but adding extra gas between the stars-- especially if some coalesces-- could absorb some energy and keep it from the planet. It makes one wonder what effect it will have, and whether it's happened in the past. A few tens of millions of years is a flashbulb on the geologic time scale. (The amount of time between now and when it will "hit" is less than the amount of time since the dinosaurs.)
E pluribus unum
Does anyone else have a problem with the word "smashing" to describe the contact of two bits of not-quite-vacuum passing through each other?
I don't. (At least not until I find out the relative masses and densities of the gas cloud vs. both the sections of the Milky Way it's about to encounter and the interstellar-gas components of them.)
The cloud may be a very hard vacuum - only slightly softer than the intergalactic space around it. But at galactic scales it still amounts to something quite dense and massive, which will not pass through the interstellar gas and solar winds of our galaxy without interacting repeatedly - let alone through the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the stars and planets that compose it.
I'd expect it to coalesce with the galaxy. That much mass at that much relative velocity will dump enormous amounts of energy into compression and heat at the shock front (similar to the graduation of "falling pebble" to something akin to a bomb when the pebble is falling at cometary speed, or a nuclear bomb when the "pebble" is also a couple miles in diameter). The energy density might be small, but over half the sky the radiant temperature can add up. Over that much matter, even at near-vacuum densities, even fusion events could be non-trivial - especially since magnetic effects could produce concentrations.
In gas clouds I'd expect it, at a minimum, to kick off a round of star formation. Also to sweep the gas and dust out from between existing stars and their planetary systems (and fractionate it), as dense accumulations are accellerated little while gas and dust encounter something of comparable density.
Even if the density is so low that the above effects aren't significant for planetary systems like ours, the passage of the cloud (especially the shock front) would wreak non-trivial havoc on the solar wind and magnetosphere - and thus planetary radiation shielding. Because the solar wind -> radiation shielding -> water condensation nucleation -> cloud cover -> solar heat reflection connection seems to be a major contributor to (geologically) short-term planetary temperature changes, the arrival and passage of the gas cloud could have a major effect on climate. (Even if its impact on the magnetosphere doesn't "stir up" some change in activity on the solar surface or modify the sunspot cycle.)
Which brings up the questions:
- Have similar events occurred in the geologically "recent" past?
- If so, do they have any relation to ice ages and interglacial periods or to mass extinction events?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't anybody light a match!
I bet quite a number of folks will stock up on gas masks when they'll hear these news...
and duct tape
Table-ized A.I.
It's easy. Just use the last several inches to cover your mouth and nose. That'll be sure to keep all those nasty gases out! Problem solved!
First God gives us the finger, and then he farts our way. He must be trying to tell us something about our conduct.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't Panic
Point to self: Another reason to stop smoking
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If I had any moderation points left, I would have used them here. Sadly, I don't, so I didn't.
Property is theft.
Will someone think of the children!!!
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
If a cloud of oxygen of the same size were to come at the Milky Way from the opposite size, would the resulting cloud of water be enough to put out all of the stars?
The Spice Must Flow!
mmmmmm
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Can someone tell me what the Gay, Bisexual and Transgender study has to do with astrophysics? Or were the astronomers just assuming the cloud was "hetro", and now they understand it better?
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Don't worry. It's a hydrogen cloud, not a cloud of hydrogen and oxygen. Without oxygen, hydrogen won't burn. The time-scale this stuff happens on is ridiculously slow. Stars, or masses not quite large enough to become stars, will syphon bits of cloud off, and grow. There will be some star formation going on, and some enlargement going on. OTOH, it's a *huge* amount of mass, so I'd hazard to guess that the orbits of things nearby will go pretty screwy... so this could mess stuff up pretty bad, without any "explosion" until millions of years have passed and the inflated stars go supernova.
Better plan ahead now or in 20-40 million years we'll have another "could have done something about it" crisis like global warming.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Since it's the Pauli exclusion principle (rather than electrostatic interactions) that makes solid matter solid, in a sense, the electrons and atomic nuclei do actually "come into contact". The notion of the atom as being a tiny electron buzzing around a tiny nucleus is as much as a myth as the "we only use 10% of our brain" notion.
But the total mass of the hydrogen cloud will have a hell of an effect. Ever seen a tornado or a hurricane? That's just a gas traveling at a sub-sonic speed. The two masses will collide traveling at a relative non-insignificant portion of the speed of light. There will be a very large amount of "smashing", gravitational combination, possibly new stars being born. All kinds of fun stuff.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
See, this is why the public are so mistrustful of science. First they say the universe is an amazing, beautiful place, then they proceed to explain why it's going to destroy life as we know it.
Wasn't that about as long as Man was going to survive in Olaf Stapleton's "Last and First Men"?
I've also heard that it is silent too!
Heh. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if that was for the benefit of some alien zoophilia site.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Don't worry. It's a hydrogen cloud, not a cloud of hydrogen and oxygen. Without oxygen, hydrogen won't burn.
:)
It's a good thing we don't live on a gigantic ball of oxygen floating in space.
if the Milky Way is the 18-wheeler, the gas cloud is the baby, our solar system can be a (still alive) bug in the windshield. That is to say, if the baby hits the windshield in the right place, our descendents can be in for a big "splat".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That Large Hydrogen Cloud is actually the Large Hadron Collider. Just look at the characters! If you change some characters here and there, munch some characters up and then write it again, you get "Large Hadron Collider"!
Well, when it his (comes into contact, if you prefer) it's expected to cause shock waves that will trigger a burst of star formation. Many of those stars will be large, which will then supernova in short order.
Sounds like a smashing good time to me.
I, for one, welcome our new Hydrogen cloud overlords!
There are lots of papers about "fossil galaxies" lurking in the Milky Way. Often its a a cluster or cloud with an unusual internal orbital trajectory/velocity. This means it hasnt reach an equilibrium state since merger and converted to a normal orbit.
> Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years,
> the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane
I wonder if Jesus will have returned by then.
He'll prolly return within the next few to few thousand years. Then the devil will be allowed to reign for another thousand.
Then 19.999 million to 39.999 million years from now, this will happen. I wonder what humanity, walking with God as he is their God, will be doing when this happens?
I humbly await my downmod. Still, ya gotta respect a guy who builds karma so he can afford to take jabs.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Although this is quite a ways off, I am still curious whether this or some other event is going to make the earth uninhabitable. My understanding was that our planet had at least a couple of billion years left in it. Reducing that to 40 million is significant, even if it doesn't effect this years elections.
Over my cold dead decomposited reincarnated (multiple times) body, it will!!
Privacy is terrorism.
Solution -- send small robitic probe with a book of matches. Upon reaching menacing hydrogen cloud, strike match. Kabloey, galaxy saved. Bonus: cool light show.
Discredit your posts? Ha-ha, it is but to laugh.
No-one can discredit your posts, and I need not waste the effort. You thoroughly discredit yourself long before anyone else gets the chance (which really isn't playing fair).
It leaves us rational sentient types facing the task of having to de-leg a snake or de-fang an earthworm. Understandably most just declare "job done" and walk away, but you amuse me.
I do thank you for the inspiration to proceed with my work though. 19 of the 33 I have approached thus far have seen fit to blaspheme the allegedly Holy Spirit thus far. Good work.
(Footnote for any sentients that might read this: The parent post is by a very special troll named Kartune which has taken it on itself to correct the universe (starting with Slashdot) regarding the infallibility of the Wholly Babble, the vast conspiracy that forces the religion of Darwinism into the schools and the lack of need for rational thought as it only leads people to doubt the bearded sky faeries word and blaspheme by suggesting that the Earth might not have been created fully formed around about tea-time on a Tuesday 5,197 years ago. In June).
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.