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Frozen Fires
Sep
11, 2009
The Chandra X-ray Telescope
has puzzled astronomers with the
discovery of abnormally high
temperatures at the core of the
Milky Way.
A news release
announcing this image of the
center of the Milky Way stated that
the x-ray spectrum of the gases is
consistent with a cloud of "hot gas"
that varies from 10 million degrees
Celsius to as much as 100 million
degrees. This result was unexpected
and difficult to explain.
According to consensus opinions,
shock waves from supernova
explosions are the most likely
explanation for heating the 10
million degree gas, but no one can
explain how the 100 million degree
gas is heated. "Ordinary" supernova
explosions are not sufficiently
powerful, and heating by high-energy
particles produces the wrong x-ray
spectrum.
Another Chandra image of the star
cluster
Trumpler 14 shows about 1600
stars and a diffuse glow from hot
multimillion degree x-ray producing
gas. Any material that has a
temperature of millions of degrees
is not a gas—it is a
plasma.
After more than a century,
laboratory investigations have
established the fact that plasma has
electrical properties, and can
conduct electricity. The flow of
electricity through a plasma forms
Birkeland
filaments,
double layers, and electric
current instabilities. Each
formation is capable of accelerating
charged particles, releasing x-rays.
In fact, they can accomplish that
feat without having a million degree
temperature, just a strong
electric field.
The region within 900 light-years of
the Milky Way Galaxy's core is shown
in other images threaded through
with glowing filaments more than 100
light-years long. The latest radio
telescope probes of this region show
that the filaments are associated
with pockets of star-formation. The
exact mechanism for creating the
filaments remains to be discovered,
but modern astronomers suggest that
one possibility is the collision of
winds blown off by individual stars.
Plasma cosmologists expect
temperature discrepancies in our
galaxy (among others), because
laboratory plasma experiments
indicated that they should exist.
Hannes Alfvén, in the introduction
to his book, Cosmic Plasma, points
out examples of plasma behavior in
his lab that astronomers were not
aware of:
"The plasma exhibited striations,
double layers, and an assortment of
oscillations and instabilities. The
electron temperature was often found
to be one or two orders of magnitude
larger than the gas temperature,
with the ion temperature
intermediate."
What Chandra found at the core of
the Milky Way is plasma that behaves
exactly the way it behaves in
experiments on Earth. Some
laboratory measurements show
temperatures ten to a hundred times
higher than simple kinetic effects
can produce ("wind collisions" and
shock waves). If astronomers had
known of the lab results, and taken
them as seriously as they take
theories of hot gas, they wouldn't
have been surprised.
Stephen Smith
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