Sci-Tech

The 'Chinese Eye' can see the structural details of extremely high-speed interstellar clouds clearly

2025-07-17   

Recently, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with scientific research institutions at home and abroad, and relying on the 500 meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST) known as the "Chinese Celestial Eye", observed for the first time a complex filamentary structure network dominated by supersonic turbulence in a cluster of ultra fast moving interstellar gas clouds in the Milky Way. This achievement provides a new perspective for revealing the evolutionary mechanism of interstellar media in the early stages of structural formation. The related paper was published online on the 16th in the international academic journal Nature Astronomy. The object of this study is an extremely high-speed cloud called G165. This is a massive gas cloud composed of hydrogen atoms, located about 50000 light-years away from Earth, in a high galactic latitude region far from the Milky Way disk, and traveling at a high speed of approximately 300 kilometers per second in the outer space of the Milky Way. Researchers explain that G165, due to its remote location and isolated environment, is almost unaffected by common factors such as stellar radiation and gravitational disturbances, making it an ideal natural laboratory for studying the formation and evolution of early stages of interstellar clouds. The ultra-high sensitivity and spatial resolution of FAST enable scientists to reveal unprecedented structural details inside extremely high-speed clouds. Observational studies have shown that G165 is mainly composed of warm neutral media, with significant supersonic turbulent motion inside and local velocity fluctuations exceeding 20 kilometers per second. Conventional high-speed clouds typically exhibit significant mixing characteristics of cold and warm gases, while G165 exhibits a completely different composition structure, with its material almost entirely composed of warm neutral gases. This significant difference indicates that extremely high velocity clouds represented by G165 are in an earlier stage of interstellar cloud evolution. This study clearly revealed the highly structured features inside G165 through the observation of neutral hydrogen 21 centimeter spectral lines in FAST - it is filled with complex interwoven filamentous structures that form a network distribution in multiple velocity layers. Observations show that these filaments intertwine in a twisted shape in three-dimensional space, and their radial density profiles exhibit significant asymmetry. This structural form indicates the presence of shock compression process inside G165, and the overall system exhibits strong turbulence characteristics. (New Society)

Edit:XunTing Responsible editor:LiuKaiEn

Source:Science and Technology Daily

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