Starship Asterisk*

The bridge of gas (shown in green) stretches from the large galaxy at the bottom
left to the group of galaxies at the top. A third nearby galaxy to the right also has
a shorter stream of gas attached to it. The three insets show expanded views of
the different galaxies and the green circle indicates the Arecibo telescope beam.
Credit: Rhys Taylor/Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey/SDSS Collaboration

Astronomers and students have found a bridge of atomic hydrogen gas 2.6 million light years long between galaxies 500 million light years away. They detected the gas using the William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory, a radio astronomy facility of the US National Science Foundation sited in Puerto Rico. The team publish their results today in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The stream of atomic hydrogen gas is the largest known, a million light years longer than a gas tail found in the Virgo Cluster by another Arecibo project a few years ago. Dr Rhys Taylor, a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences and lead author of the paper, said "This was totally unexpected. We frequently see gas streams in galaxy clusters, where there are lots of galaxies close together, but to find something this long and not in a cluster is unprecedented."

It is not just the length of the stream that is surprising but also the amount of gas found in it. Roberto Rodriguez, a 2014 graduate from the University of Puerto Rico in Humacao who worked on the project as an undergraduate, explained "We normally find gas inside galaxies, but here half of the gas – 15 billion times the mass of the Sun – is in the bridge. That’s far more than in the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies combined!"

The team is still investigating the origin of the stream. One notion surmises that the large galaxy at one end of the stream passed close to the group of smaller galaxies at the other end in the past, and that the gas bridge was drawn out as they moved apart. A second notion suggests that the large galaxy plowed straight through the middle of the group, pushing gas out of it. The team plan to use computer simulations to find out which of these ideas can best match the shape of the bridge that is seen with the Arecibo Telescope. ...

• Monthly Notices of the RAS 443(3) 2634 (2014 Sep 21) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1305
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1407.0016 > 30 Jun 2014

"I am reluctant to say (because no one will believe this)."
"At some stage of universal development early universe filaments segmented into what became, called here, Omega bodies. Notable is that these segmented ‘chunks’ were nearly equal in mass size (check the math). (That process is described very simply here.) Most of these primordial objects had spin and angular momentum, plus other qualities not discussed here.
Some, during their high velocity passage through space, acquired a a sizable volume of dark and other matter....

Those Omega bodies that had little spin loosened their parts more or less omnidirectionally, not very distant. The galaxies that developed from these were later very prone to collide and merge with each other.
Most of these primordial ‘rocks’ had high spin rates. The first fragments to come off were flung a great distance. Each taking with it a share of the accumulated dark matter. (Dark matter in these cases was like the yolk of an egg.)

The first sibling pieces in our family to come off the progenitor Omega body, each weighing multiple solar masses, were M83, M64, NGC 253. At the same time many smaller units were launched. Each loss of mass to the Omega body reduced the forces of angular momentum. Until finally we have the last division that gave us our Milky Way and Andromeda. In that manner Omega had sacrificed itself to seed more than a hundred new galaxies."

" Some of those Omega bodies are still out there just waiting for something to happen (dark galaxies). A few others exploded; galaxies formed but no structured order was established.
Those that had the right amount of spin, plus other opportunities, much like ours, formed a planar pattern of galaxy formation. The large galaxies, mostly spiral, in turn followed the example of their progenitor by producing satellite galaxies in a similar manner."

MargaritaMc wrote:Wouldn't it be fun if press releases were all like Rhys's version?

And Geck, where have I been hiding? I had to Google "Nibiru" as I thought it was a make of car!
Having read Wikipedia - Oh yes, the Omega matter bloke will certainly have a Nibiru connection.

Rhetorical and totally pointless question: WHY/HOW do these ideas ever get dreamed up? As someone with an addiction to facts and verified sources it bewilders me.

Margarita

PS Rhys - nice piece of research. Congrats.