Voids Made by Dying Stars Have Been Detected in Our Galaxy's Interstellar Gas

People leave a void when they die. It's true in the case of massive stars.

A new analysis of the tenuous gas between the stars has shown bubbles that expand into space when a giant star dies. Scientists say the ghosts record a history of star death and rotation.

There is still room between the stars. Sometimes coming together in more diffuse clouds, mostly of atomic hydrogen, in the gaps in space When stars die, they seed the clouds with the elements they created in their core.

The way in which these clouds form and arrange themselves is not fully understood. The astronomer led by Juan Diego Soler of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics set about studying the structures in the neutral atomic hydrogen that surrounds our universe.

The team used the HI4PI project's data to get a map of the neutral atomic hydrogen in the sky.

It's the most detailed survey of its kind that has been done so far. The researchers can see the distance to structures in the gas by combining the two models.

The team was able to tease out fine structures in the hydrogen that would have been impossible to see by eye using the data.

There were fine threads of gas that were close to the disk, but that weren't aligned with the plane of the galaxy. The filaments were almost parallel to the plane of the universe.

The networks were thought to be the result of feedback from the stars.

The fact that we see mostly horizontal structures in the outer Milky Way, where there is a decrease in the number of massive stars, suggests that we are recording the energy and momentum input from stars shaping the gas in our galaxy.

The team said that this could be used to understand the processes that shaped the disk of the Milky Way and to study the fossils of ancient processes.

There is a new context for interpreting other phenomena in the vicinity of the filaments.

There are associations of supernovae that are very efficient at lifting gas and turbulence. The discovery of these structures in the atomic hydrogen is an important step in understanding how stars form.

The research was published in astronomy and astrophysics.