In the search for the amount of interstellar gas in our galaxy, scientists have found traces of bubbles spreading through space when a massive star explodes in a supernova.
As suggested in their work published in Astronomy and astrophysicsThese relics constitute the history of the death of stars and the rotation of the entire Milky Way. The nature of these interstellar clouds, including their formation and evolution, is not fully understood. To change this, scientists led by Juan Diego Soler of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics used data from the HI4PI project. Its purpose was to observe the sky in the radio wave band to obtain a map of neutral atomic hydrogen across the Milky Way.
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Thanks to this team, it was possible to map the distribution and velocity of hydrogen in our galaxy. By combining this information with a model that includes the rotation of the Milky Way, scientists can determine the distance to structures in the gas. The algorithm used, among other things, to analyze the satellite images, helped by extracting minute structures in the hydrogen that could not be recognized by sight.
After stars explode due to supernovae, there is a distinct void
When analyzing the distribution of gas fibers on the galactic scale, the study authors considered it a kind of feedback fingerprint that occurs in the gas after each supernova event in our galaxy. Additional research on this topic should facilitate understanding of the processes that shaped the disk of the Milky Way and provide a tool for studying the “fossils” of past processes to reconstruct the history of our galaxy.
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The remnants of multiple supernova explosions are likely spewing gas and creating bubbles that explode when they reach the characteristic size of a galactic plane, like bubbles rising to the surface in a glass of sparkling wine. […] The fact that we see mainly horizontal structures in the outer part of the Milky Way, where there is a significant decrease in the number of massive stars and therefore fewer supernovae, indicates that we are recording energy and momentum contributions to star gas formation in our galaxy.Explains Ralph Claesen of the University of Heidelberg
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