Milky Way 'POPS PILLS and SNORTS GAS', insist boffins Astroboffins have labelled the Milky Way, the gaggle of stars in which Earth resides, a “pill-popping galaxy hooked on gas”. The lurid label comes from Dr Alex Hill, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Astronomy and Space Science at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the paper he's …
Inb4 the "Plasma Universe" horde discovers this article and uphelds it as particularly telling proof of their belief in a, well, "Plasma Universe" while hatin' on good old Gravitation.
Is that what you want, El Reg? Are you stirring the pot?
Meanwhile....
"Faraday rotation is sensitive only to magnetic fields in ionized gas! Although magnetized gas in the Galaxy with a low ionization fraction does not contribute significantly to Faraday rotation, gas with the ionization fraction of the warm and cold neutral media is still affected by Lorentz forces due to ion-neutral collisions. Therefore, if a field is present in the neutral gas but does not have an evident RM signature due to the low electron density, it could still be dynamically important. Because most of the RM detections reported here are concentrated in narrow, possibly shocked filaments, the magnetic field lines are likely compressed. Because the mass contained in the filaments is larger than can be explained by swept-up gas from the ambient ISM, the filaments are most likely gas stripped and decelerated from the HVC."
You now picture the above explained to you breathlessly by a lab-coat equipped gorgeous Young Scientist (evidently female) barely old enough to be out of high school, this with "Navy CSI" eagerness, while infographic porn designed by the Best Of CNN is being exhibited out-of-focus in swirling, cool blue shades (with zests of warm orange) on several large flat-panel displays in the background.
Also, scary music.
The caffeine is strong with this one.
Or did you go trick and treating with the kids last night, and eat too many of those cheap Chinese sweets made of pure, unadulterated chemical colourings, flavourings, additives and industrial strength resins, polymers, benzoates and fluorinated coal tar distillates?
" I'm not into that Halloween crap"
Nobody is. Just an excuse for Tesco to sell pumpkins, and for kids to pester neighbours for sweets. Not that I would deliberately fill the bowl with aforementioned toxic sweets, nor particularly favour the blue ones that make kids buzz until they rattle. Or get rid of the out of date ones found festering at the back of cupboards. Admittedly last year's offering included a handful of joke shop soap sweets, but I'm sure they were appreciated by the recipients.
If I'm feeling very cruel next year, I may drop into Asda and buy some of that dog doo flavour Hersheys.
These things are usually discussed in terms of mass. 2 million solar diameters would make it only 2.8x10^15 meters. A lightyear is 9.5x10^15 meters. We can't resolve an image of something that small at galactic distances unless it's many ly across. For comparison the Pillars of Creation are only 4 ly tall and they're right next door at 7,000 ly and it takes the Hubble to see that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
