gas clouds tagged posts

An all-sky map showing the radial velocity of neutral hydrogen gas belonging to the high-velocity clouds of the Milky Way and two neighboring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Credit: ICRAR

An Australian scientist has created the most detailed map ever of clouds of high-velocity gas in the Universe around us. The map covers the entire sky and shows curious clouds of neutral hydrogen gas that are moving at a different speed to the normal rotation of the Milky Way. It was created by astronomer Dr Tobias Westmeier, University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, and published in the leading journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Dr Westmeier said the map suggests that at least 13% of the sky is covered by high-v...

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the compact green pea galaxy J0925+1403. The diameter of the galaxy is approximately 6,000 light years, and it is about twenty times smaller than the Milky Way. Credit: NASA

Astronomers gain a new understanding of the re-ionization of the universe by studying a nearby dwarf ‘green pea’ galaxy. Newly formed dwarf galaxies were likely the reason that the universe heated up about 13 billion years ago. The finding opens an avenue for better understanding the early period of the universe’s 14 billion year history.

In the period of several hundred thousand yrs after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense that matter was ionized instead of being in a neutral form...