Milky Way Is Surrounded By Halo of Hot Gas 121
New submitter kelk1 writes "If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it also could be an explanation for what is known as the 'missing baryon' problem for the galaxy [...] a census of the baryons present in stars and gas in our galaxy and nearby galaxies shows at least half the baryons are unaccounted for [...] Although there are uncertainties, the work by Gupta and colleagues provides the best evidence yet that the galaxy's missing baryons have been hiding in a halo of million-kelvin gas that envelopes the galaxy."
Re:1,000,000 K ?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
here in the technical vastness of The Future, we can guess that surely, the past was very different. We know for certain, for instance, that for some reason, for some time in the beginning, there were hot lumps. Cold and lonely, they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space.
This is making me feel like there's a big game going on.
You'll never escape gravity!
OK, you escaped gravity, but you'll never survive the Van Allen Radiation Belt!
OK, you passed through the Van Allen Radiation Belt, but you'll never make it through the Asteroid belt!
OK, you successfully navigated the Asteroid belt, but you'll never make it through the Kuiper belt!
Dang, you made it through the Kuiper belt, but you'll never, ever make it through the Baryon Halo! Muah ha ha ha haaaah!
Galactic Barrier (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Galactic_barrier [memory-alpha.org]
So Star Trek had it right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hot gas is a plasma, but nobody here seems to c (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wait (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that's news is that the hot gas makes it possible to account for the baryons in the Milky Way halo, which were previously undetected.
The thought that we're just the 0.1% of the dirty precipitate at the bottom of the gravity well is a tad humbling. Not that much isn't when you look up from the T.V. to a clear night sky.
Galaxies are apparently quite dynamic things: a rain of in-falling gas to make new stars, pressure from new stars pushing back, dust build up from all this nucleosynthesis, blackhole cores that cycle on and off. One paper I read even claims this is the beginning of the 'green' period for the Milky Way. The conditions for life will be come more abundant: the number of long-burning dwarf stars like the sun continue to rise as a fraction of the stellar population while the dust percentage (you know, planets) rises at the same time a lot of the big super- and hyper- novae are over with.
However, longer term prospects seem bleak if the dynamic gas is all consumed or blown away. Eventually stellar production would grind to a halt. The green galaxy would give way to white and red dwarfs floating amid other stellar corpses and thinned gas.
I have to wonder if the temperature and environmental coupling of this gas is enough to become a future raw star material resource? I mean, we're talking about 99.9% of the matter here and it's already gravitationally bound. Could someone model long-term in-fall of this ionized matter? Could it cool fast enough or even at all to beat the predicted 'big rip' from dark energy and give the galaxy a 2nd, 3rd, etc. childhood?