Jorge Salazar

(Austin, TX) An enormous cloud of hydrogen gas in space threatens to crash into our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers announced at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

There’s no need to panic though, as the gas cloud is predicted to strike a spiral arm of the Milky Way 40,000 light years from Earth and in about 20 million years. For now, this discovery marks the first time a three-dimensional view of the gas cloud has ever been made as it moves through space.

“This cloud that we’re seeing today is a remnant of the formation of the Milky Way,” said Jay Lockman, leader of the science team that studied the gas cloud. Lockman is the principal scientist of the Greenbank Telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. He said that billions of years ago, the Milky Way galaxy was probably formed when a lot of objects like this gas cloud, or even bigger objects, clumped together.

“And so, this object, this cloud, is kind of left-over debris from the construction of the Milky Way, in the same way that the comets and asteroids are leftover debris from the building of the solar system,” said Lockman to Earth & Sky.

The Greenbank Telescope collected over 40,000 measurements of radio waves streaming from the object, called Smith’s Cloud, which was first discovered by Gail Beeger Smith in 1963.

It measures 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, and it’s moving towards the Milky Way at a supersonic speed of 150 miles every second. With it comes the equivalent of one million suns worth of hydrogen gas into a region of space ripe with the formation of new stars. “And so that gas is going to shock the local gas,” said Lockman to Earth & Sky. The shock might trigger formation of a whole cluster of new stars.

What’s more, Lockman said that this far-off region in the Perseus spiral arm of the Milky Way might have habitable planets. “So people who were living in the area would probably see the event as a series of shocks in interstellar gas and then subsequently a lot of new, big stars forming. It would really light up the sky.” To the local denizens, it might look something akin to an aurora, said Lockman’s collaborator and co-panelist Robert A. Benjamin, of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

(Austin, TX) In the fall of 2008, NASA will send a crew aboard the Atlantis space shuttle to perform a final service mission on the Hubble Space Telescope, a panel of scientists announced in Austin at the 211th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Astronaut John Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that repair work and upgrades to Hubble will “reinvent” the space telescope. “The detector technology and the wavelength coverage that we’ll have,” said Grunsfeld, “is going to allow us to have new views of the universe that are just going to astound and amaze everyone, scientists and amateur astronomers, everybody.” Grunsfeld is Lead Spacewalker and Payload Officer for the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4, and this will be his third trip to the Hubble, which orbits 350 miles above Earth.

The mission will entail five spacewalks and aims to increase the telescope’s capabilities by a factor of 90, according to panelist Sandra Faber, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz. After the repairs and upgrades, “it’ll have the capability of 100 Hubbles,” said panelist and NASA Chief Scientist Alan Stern.

When asked about the risks posed by the Hubble service mission, Astronaut Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that, “I think the cause of science is something worth risking my life for. I’ve spent almost my entire adult life and most of my young life,” Grunsfeld added, “in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. And Hubble is almost an icon for the quest of scientific knowledge.”

Congratulations to Dr. Brian May of the legendary rock band Queen, the hardest working man in show business. The Times reported that picking up where he left off more than 30 years ago as a student in astrophysics, Brian May completed his PhD from Imperial College.

“Using a giant telescope in the Canary Islands, May was able to show for the first time that dust clouds in the solar system are moving in the same direction as the planets. He will receive his PhD next May, provided that his thesis is approved by assessors,” the Times stated.

This is rekindling my interest in podcasting the interview that Earth & Sky did with Dr. May, where he shared his thoughts on those huge telescopes pointed to the vastness that surrounds us.

You can write Dr. May a note of congrats and check out the rock star in his cap and gown at his blog, Brian’s Soapbox. ROCK ON!