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An invisible molecular cloud that could shed light on how stars and planets are formed were surprisingly detected near the earth.
Named EOS according to the Greek goddess of the dawn, the gas cloud will appear huge in the night sky if it was visible to the naked eye. It measures about 40 moons in width and has a weight about 3,400 times the mass of the sun, researchers reported in a study Posted Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“In astronomy, see the invisible generally means more deeply with increasingly sensitive telescopes – detect these small planets … These more distant galaxies,” said the co -author of the Thomas Haworth study, astrophysicist at Queen Mary University of London.
“This thing was roughly in our cosmic garden, and we just missed it,” he added.
The molecular clouds are made up of gas and dust from which hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clusters in these clouds can collapse to form young stars.
Scientists generally spot a molecular cloud using radio and infrared observations that can pick up the chemical signature of carbon monoxide, said Haworth.
“We normally seek carbon monoxide, a single carbon atom and an oxygen atom, and this emits light fairly easily to wavelengths that we can detect,” he said. “(Carbon monoxide is) shiny, and we have a lot of installations that can spot it.”
However, the EOS has escaped discovery despite being the molecular cloud closest to the earth because it does not contain much carbon monoxide, and therefore does not emit the characteristic signature detected by conventional approaches, the researchers said. The key to unlocking this amazing find was the search for an ultraviolent light emitted by hydrogen in the cloud.
“The only reason we managed to catch it in this case is that we were able to look with a different light of light,” added Haworth.
Haworth and his colleagues detected EOS in the data collected by an extraviolet spectrograph called Fims-Spear which worked as an instrument on a Korean satellite called Stat-1.
The data had just been published publicly in 2023 when the author of the main study Blakesley Burkhart, associate professor of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, met it.
The spectrograph breaks down the very ultraviolet light emitted by a material in wavelengths of components, similar to what a prism made with visible light, creating a spectrum that scientists can analyze.
“This is the very first molecular cloud discovered by directly looking for an ultraviolet emission far from molecular hydrogen,” Burkhart said in a press release. “The data has shown shiny hydrogen molecules detected by fluorescence in the distant ultraviolet. This cloud literally shines in darkness. ”
The proximity of the molecular cloud with the earth offers a unique opportunity to study how solar systems are formed, said Burkhart.
“Our discovery of EOS is fascinating because we can now measure directly how molecular clouds are formed and dissociate, and how a galaxy begins to transform interstellar gas and dust into stars and planets,” said Burkhart.
Astronomers thought they had a good handful on the locations and properties of molecular clouds in around 1,600 light years of the sun, making this “cool discovery,” said Melissa McClure, assistant professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
“This new molecular cloud, EOS, is only 300 light years, which is closer than all the molecular clouds that we know before,” said McClure, which was not involved in research.
“It is confusing why there is something so large in our solar district that we have not seen before,” added McClure. “It would be a bit like living in a suburbs with houses above the floor and open prizes, and suddenly realizing that one of the open lots actually hosts a hidden underground bunker.”