How About...Sonic Boom!

Remember a previous post dealing with Herschel Telescope?

Well, if you haven´t read it yet here you can take a look to know more about what I am talking about, because believe me Herschel telescope is amazing.

And if you already read that previous article, I need to tell You something...remember that quote

"188 years later, Herschel still gazes at the skies." Well after reading this article, You might think I will need to re-phrase that quote for something like "188 years later, Herschel keeps surprising us."

ESA's Herschel telescope keeps giving us surprises, and this is because previously, scientists had already seen some intriguing filaments that came out of young new born  stars. 


As we know, when stars are forming, they begin by gathering the material around them, which happens to be the cloud made up of diverse materials.  Well scientists were wondering why new born stars had these filaments coming out of the star cloud.


Here is the first step of curiosity, why are those filaments there?


Then as technology began getting better (technology=Herschel Telescope) scientists found out that these filaments seemed to be quite similar between them. Scientists began analyzing more and discovered that some  even had the same length (approximately 20,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun). 


Surprises became even greater when experts analysed a group of 90 filaments, in the Aquila region and discovered that independently of their composition, length or density they all had roughly the same width.


Yes, you read correctly, they all had the same width. So now came the second stage: explanations.


Scientists believe that the reason of this Filaments having the same width (and some even the same length) is that they are the result of the rapid energy-mass ejection of the star cloud, and since they reach barely sound speed. These "star clouds" or correctly named interstellar clouds  are extremely cold (10 K) allowing sound speed to be of around 0.2 km/s.


So scientists use the analogy of sonic boom with these interstellar shockwaves, to explain how this sonic boom is ejected from the interstellar cloud and as it loses energy it slows down and finally scatter, resulting in what we see as filaments. Still scientists will keep investigating to try to find some more connections between new born stars and these filaments.


Here are the so famous filaments: 

Dense filaments of gas in the IC5146 interstellar cloud can be seen clearly in this image taken in infrared light by the Herschel space observatory. Stars are forming along these filaments. The blue region is a stellar nursery known as the Cocoon nebula.
This image was taken by ESA’s Herschel space observatory at infrared wavelengths of 70, 250 and 500 microns.

Special thanks to ESA and NASA for the images,  and of course to You for reading.


Thanks!


I.