Magnetically-shielded giant gas cloud on collision course with Milky Way Galaxy

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November 1, 2013SPACEDiscovered in 1963 by the Dutch astronomer Gail Bieger, the Smith Cloud is one of thousands of high velocity clouds flying around the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy. The cloud is at least 2 million times the mass of our Sun. If it were visible to the naked eye, it would look 20 times wider than the full Moon. Traveling at 130 km a second, the cloud is only 8,000 light-years from the Galaxy’s disk. “Clouds like this may provide the fuel for our Galaxy to make stars. But they must be held together by something, or they’d disintegrate when they hit the warm outer part of the Galaxy – the halo. They wouldn’t reach the Galaxy’s disk, where the star-making is going on,” explained Dr. Alex Hill from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, who is the lead author of a…

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