Carl Sagan popularized the notion that we are made of star dust. And some of that dust, like the iron in our blood, even comes from supernova explosions. When massive, short-lived stars blow their fiery guts in a funeral pyre that can be detected across the universe. So it’s too surprising that some of the atoms liberated by those distant eruptions ends up in the Milky Way galaxy:
They got a big surprise instead. The simulations showed that supernovae, the explosions of dying stars, can produce winds of gas that can escape their parent galaxy, travel for billions of years across intergalactic space, and become absorbed into a different galaxy, where the newly arrived atoms may form new stars. The simulations demonstrated that gas flows from smaller galaxies to larger galaxies, like the Milky Way. The researchers dubbed the phenomenon, which Anglés-Alcázar said hasn’t been studied before, intergalactic transfer.
Over vast periods of time, these winds get established into currents. And like rivers they are ultimately powered by gravity. Just like on the Earth’s surface, the currents drain into basins like our large spiral galaxy. Scientists estimate this may account for up to half the matter in a large galaxy, which means it could account for half the matter in you.
- The movie Idiocracy was spot on in so many ways it’s scary. But it won’t be Costco or Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator that rules the commercial world. It will be Amazon.
- North Korea is going to get ICBM capability while Donald Trump is in the White House.
- This week, mental health professionals gave in and decided it was okay to publicly try and diagnose Trump from afar.
- The failure of the Really Bad Healthcare Act in the Senate this week could be read as a warning from senators aimed across the bow of the WH. But the fundamental problem the GOP is running into is the ACA, i.e., Obamacare, was the most conservative plan ever proposed that does things like cover everyone. There’s nothing to the right of it that does all those same things. So even in theory, there is not a more conservative plan to replace the ACA with.