New radio images catch a mushroom-shaped gas cloud bursting over 1,000 light-years out of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, propelled by the power of 500 suns. These observations provide the first detailed view of the gas columns which appear to link the disk with altitudes high in our galaxy's atmosphere. They will help reveal how heat, radiation, dust, and gas could all rise away from their cradles, which are in clusters of igniting and dying stars, and in doing so contribute to the formation of our galaxy's hot gas halo. Although theories exist which model the chimney-like behaviour of gas column clouds, the preliminary measurements from these Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) images challenge these current scenarios.
Credit: Drs. Jayanne English (University of Manitoba; formally of Queen's University), Russ Taylor (University of Calgary), Judith Irwin (Queen's University), and Sergey Mashchenko (University of Laval) of the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey/Releve Canadien du Plan Galactique (CGPS/RCPG).
| Text of Full Press Release | Plain Text Version | Latex Formated Version | Postscript Version |
| Figure 1: The Mushroom Cloud |  Colour for Sun Monitor's: jpeg |  Colour for Mac Monitors: jpeg | Colour for Mac Monitors: tiff |
| Figure 1. Caption | Plain Text Version | Latex Formated Version | Postscript Version |
| Figure 2: Mushroom-Shaped Supershell Scenario |  Unlabeled jpeg figure |  Labeled jpeg figure | |
| Figure 2. Caption | Plain Text Version | Latex Formated Version | Postscript Version |
The image below links to an illustration of the difference
in scale between predicted mushroom-shaped clouds and the
observed cloud. The scale of the
outline of a blowout model by Tenorio-Tagle,
Rozyczka, and Bodenheimer (1990) is
almost 4x that in the observed data.
Jpeg figure with labels
The images below link to black and white Jpeg images
of the integrated intensity over the FWHM of the
observed HI data.
|  |
If you have any other questions or comments, contact
Jayanne English.