A Cloud Called Smith

by Clifford Johnson     Department: Space

I'll admit that a great deal of attraction of the story for me is the idea that the cloud is called the "Smith Cloud". It's also interesting because it reminds us of how dynamic our universe is, including our own neighbourhood  - the Milky Way galaxy. So what's the story? It's that there's a giant (huge!!) cloud of gas not far from our galaxy that is headed on a collision course with the Milky Way. It had been discovered back in 1963 by an astronomer called Gail Smith, but at the time she did not determine much about its trajectory. Recently, another astronomer, Jay Lockman (working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank) decided to carefully study the cloud, and announced that it is in fact going to collide with us.

Steady on now, let's not start stockpiling water and twinkies (or whatever it is you are supposed to stockpile if a cosmic event is about to transpire -  Milky Way  bars, perhaps?). It is not due to collide until about between 20 to 40 million years from now. While this is much sooner than the other exciting collision pencilled in on our calendar (the one with our neighbour the Andromeda galaxy - 3 or 4 billion years from now), it is still a bit of a while away. Furthermore, it is projected to hit a part of our galaxy that is quite a bit away from where we are, so we're doubly safe for now. Perhaps  we'll all have evolved into beings of light or some other fancy life-form by then anyway. There's a good NPR story  about this here.

In  other collision news, it seems that the collision that could have happened in a week or two (Jan 30th) between an asteroid and Mars is now unlikely. (I blogged about it here.) Seems that astronomers tracking the object have now got enough data about its trajectory to be more certain that it will miss Mars. So no fireworks there. This also means that there'll be no interesting data to be revealed about the composition of Mars' crust from that event. Oh well. More information here.

Astrophysical collisions are such fun -  anyone remember comet  Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter in July 1994? Huge online resources can be found here.

Drive/walk/cycle carefully now...

-cvj

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