ANU: Study Sheds New Light on How Our Solar System Formed

[bystander]

ANU Study Sheds New Light on How Our Solar System Formed
Australian National University | 2018 May 10

A study led by The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Crete in Greece has shed new light on the mystery of how our solar system formed in a cloud of gas and dust in space billions of years ago.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Lead researcher Dr Aris Tritsis from ANU said the study visualised the 3D shape of a star-forming cloud called Musca, which appears as a needle in the southern sky.

Musca lies hundreds of light years away from Earth. The large gas cloud, formed mainly of molecular hydrogen and dust, stretches about 27 light years across the plane of the sky, with a depth of about 20 light years and width up to a fraction of a light year. ...

Musca is surrounded by ordered hair-like structures called striations, which are produced by trapped waves of gas and dust caused by the global vibrations of the cloud.

The research team was able to determine the shape of Musca by analysing the spatial frequencies of these vibrations, which were then converted into ringing tones to reveal the ‘Song of Musca’. ...

Magnetic Seismology of Interstellar Gas Clouds: Unveiling a Hidden Dimension - Aris Tritsis, Konstantinos Tassis

• Science 360(6389):635 (11 May 2018) DOI: 10.1126/science.aao1185
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1805.03664 > 09 May 2018

[Ann]

Weird. I though Musca was the constellation where this dust cloud can be found, and the dark cloud itself is called the Dark Doodle (or something like that).

Ann