NASA has released a unexampled video on the notorious Smith Cloud , a high - velocity cloud that is expected to crash into the Milky Way in about 30 million years .
The swarm has a mass of 2 million sun and is moving at 310 kilometers ( 193 geographical mile ) per secondly . It was first discovered by astronomer Gail Smith in 1963 , and for many years it was reckon just one of the several high - velocity cloud around the Milky Way .
This idea changed in the mid-2000s when astronomers front at the Smith Cloud with the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia , and discover that it was on a collision course with our own beetleweed .
Suddenly , we know where it is going but not where it come from , so in the last few years , astronomers looked into its potential rootage . Theirfindingswere published early on this class .
" There are two leading theories , " Andrew Fox , an stargazer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who lead the research , said in thevideo . " One is that it was blown out of the Milky Way , perhaps by a cluster of supernova explosions . The other is that the Smith Cloud is an extragalactic physical object that has been captured by the Milky Way . "
The team used the Hubble Space Telescope to carefully study the light absorbed by the cloud . Thanks to this technique , they were able to calculate the abundance of different elements in the Smith Cloud . The scientist discovered that the abundance of sulfur in the swarm is similar to the abundance of sulfur in the outer disk of the Milky Way , suggesting that the first supposition is the right one .
" The swarm appears to have been eject from within the Milky Way and is now fall back , " Fox add . " The swarm is fragmenting and evaporating as it plows through a halo of diffuse gasolene surrounding our galaxy . It ’s basically fall aside . ”
Although it ’s losing piece , the swarm will still be quite big when it hits our extragalactic nebula in the future . The Smith Cloud will not induce any damage , but astronomers expect that its large accelerator pedal reservoir will be compressed and sprain into many new wizard as it re - enters our galaxy .
