Humongous ball of gas traveling pretty fast

[silkworm]

An international team of astronomers have discovered a massive gas ball hurtling through a distant galaxy cluster. This ball of gas is traveling more than 750 km/second (466 miles/second) through galaxy cluster Abell 3266. The enormous speed and pressure has heated the gas up to the point that it blazes in the X-ray spectrum. The discovery was made using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite.

 

The gas ball is about three million light years across, or about five thousand million times the size of our solar system.

 

Pic at the URL.

 

http://www.universetoday.com/2006/06/12/gigantic-ball-of-fire-discovered/

 

Wow!

 

I guess this thing is so massive it may be seeding galaxies by the mass that it loses as it travels.

 

Thankfully...

 

The gas ball is in a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266, millions of light years from Earth, thus posing absolutely no danger to our solar system.

 

This blew me away when I heard it.

 

Wow!

[alt_f13]

An interesting visual to be sure, almost anthropomorphic. Must have been ejected during a galaxie collision...?

[Martin]

Pic at the URL.

 

http://www.universetoday.com/2006/06/12/gigantic-ball-of-fire-discovered/

 

 

 

That's really interesting. I will try to find out more about it.

 

if it is glowing at Xray wavelengths, then I guess that means it has reached a temperature on the order of a million kelvin or more

I suppose that is the heat of collision with local matter (gas, dust etc) in the cluster of galaxies that it is traveling through.

 

they say it's diameter is some 3 million lightyears. Our galaxy diameter is around 180,000 LY if I remember right, anyway something under 200,000.

And our Milkyway galaxy is part of a small local cluster called the local Group, which includes other nearby galaxies like Andromeda and the Magellan Clouds. This thing's diameter is somewhat bigger than the distance from us to Andromeda. I am trying to picture it careening thru our local Group. It would be big enough so it couldnt fit thru the gap between Milky and Andromeda but would sort of "rub" both of them as it went thru.

 

the speed of 750 km/sec is impressive. the galaxies in a group are usually moving somewhat relative to each other, like Andromeda is getting closer to us at a rate of IIRC around 50 km/sec. but the usual speeds within a cluster of galaxies are more like that, it is not usual for stuff to be moving 750 km/sec.

 

those guys are quite right to be amazed. I will see if I can find out some more

[Martin]

Silkworm,

 

Here is an earlier paper by three of the scientists mentioned in your article. As you see, it is about the cluster of galaxies called Abell 3266. And it concerns observing the cluster in Xray wavelengths, and detecting this cloud of gas. they give an estimate of the mass of the cloud. they say the mass is 20 trillion solar masses. that is 2E13.

 

the mass of the Andromeda galaxy is only on the order of one trillion solar masses, that is E12. If their estimate is correct, it is a seriously massive cloud.

 

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505036'>http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505036

A Puzzling Merger in A3266: the Hydrodynamic Picture from XMM-Newton

A. Finoguenov, M. J. Henriksen, F. Miniati, U. G. Briel, C. Jones

6 pages, ApJ subm

 

"Using the mosaic of nine XMM-Newton observations, we study the hydrodynamic state of the merging cluster of galaxies Abell 3266. The high quality of the spectroscopic data and large field of view of XMM-Netwon allow us to determine the thermodynamic conditions of the intracluster medium on scales of order of 50 kpc. A high quality entropy map reveals the presence of an extended region of low entropy gas, running from the primary cluster core toward the northeast along the nominal merger axis. The mass of the low entropy gas amounts to approximately 2e13 solar masses, which is comparable to the baryonic mass of the core of a rich cluster. We test the possibility that the origin of the observed low entropy gas is either related to the disruption a preexisting cooling core in Abell 3266 or to the stripping of gas from an infalling subcluster companion. We find that both the radial pressure and entropy profiles as well as the iron abundance of Abell 3266 do not resemble those in other known cooling core clusters (Abell 478). Thus we conclude that the low entropy region is subcluster gas in the process of being stripped off from its dark matter halo. In this scenario the subcluster would be falling onto the core of A3266 from the foreground. This would also help interpret the observed high velocity dispersion of the galaxies in the cluster center, provided that the mass of the subcluster is at most a tenth of the mass of the main cluster."

 

the three co-authors mentioned in your news release are A. Finoguenov, M. J. Henriksen, F. Miniati

 

I found this article just by going to arxiv

http://arxiv.org/

clicking search, to get

http://arxiv.org/find

and typing Finoguenov into the author box to get

http://arxiv.org/find/grp_physics/1/au:+Finoguenov/0/1/0/all/0/1

which is a list of his papers

arxiv is one of the good things in life which if you don't know about you should :smile:

[silkworm]

Thanks for showing me arxiv Martin.

 

My questions now are 1) Where is it going? 2) How did it get moving so fast?

 

Any off chance that it is orbiting an even larger object?

[Martin]

Thanks for showing me arxiv Martin.

My questions now are 1) Where is it going? 2) How did it get moving so fast? Any off chance that it is orbiting an even larger object?

 

my thanks to you for flagging the original news item

it is awesome.

 

regards

[silkworm]

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/cloud/colour_w3.jpg

 

There's a new pic.

[bob000555]

It would be intresting if it hits a star, if the gas is hydrogen and it hits a star wouldn't that make a huge star?

[CanadaAotS]

This gas ball is much much bigger then a mere star... probably wouldnt phase it much lol.

[silkworm]

I think the giant gas ball is methanol, which I find odd.

[elfstone]

With this kind of mass, isn't its gravity affecting even galaxies? What an awesome and scary find

[ecoli]

I am amazed, on a daily basis, by the discovers made by astronomers.

[Martin]

I am amazed, on a daily basis, by the discovers made by astronomers.

 

me too

the field is going thru a good time (like particle physics did around the 60s and 70s)

I feel lucky to be able watch.

[silkworm]

me too

the field is going thru a good time (like particle physics did around the 60s and 70s)

I feel lucky to be able watch.

 

It really bothers me how much you have to dig to find this sort of thing. I mean, this is the largest object known to man, and I didn't see it anywhere mainstream.

[bob000555]

This gas ball is much much bigger then a mere star... probably wouldnt phase it much lol.

No but it could ignite it...or it could become part of the fusion mass of the star.

[[Tycho?]]

No but it could ignite it...or it could become part of the fusion mass of the star.

 

I rather doubt it. I'd think something so massive and so hot (its emitting x-rays) would already be undergoing fusion if it was capable of doing so. And regardless the object is much too large for the entire thing to fuse or do much else; if part of it started to fuse, the energy released would tend to blow away matter. So its not like the whole thing could undergo fusion at the same time.

[insane_alien]

its far too difuse to ignite. you can't light petrol if theres a metre between the molecules.