‘Smith Cloud’ plummeting back into Milky Way will give birth to two million new stars

A FREAKISHLY fast gas cloud is plummeting towards our galaxy at 1,116,000 kilometres each hour. When it hits — in 30 million years time — it will bathe our night sky with new light.

A FREAKISHLY fast gas cloud is plummeting towards our galaxy at 1,116,000 kilometres each hour. When it hits — in 30 million years time — it will bathe our night sky with new light.

It’s big.

Some 11,000 light years wide, in fact.

Known as the ‘Smith Cloud’, this isn’t your everyday mass of galactic gas.

It’s fast.

Very fast.

Smith Cloud on collision course w Milky Way, will provide enough gas to make 2 million suns: https://t.co/3i0ZZzR3hH pic.twitter.com/NQjqTgASBt

— NASA Goddard (@NASAGoddard) January 28, 2016

It was ejected from the Milky Way some 70 million years ago.

While moving incredibly fast, it was not moving quite quick enough to escape our galaxy’s gravitational influence — and perhaps that of surrounding mysterious dark matter.

Instead, it got a slingshot boost.

And Hubble’s spotted it boomeranging back towards from whence it came.

When it hits, the molecular cloud will collapse among the gas and dust already here — igniting some two million new stars among the exiting 400 billion.

Source: ESA / NASA

“The cloud is an example of how the galaxy is changing with time,” says lead researcher Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “It’s telling us that the Milky Way is a bubbling, very active place where gas can be thrown out of one part of the disk and then return back down into another.”

While the astronomers have analysed its trajectory and composition enough to determine it was likely kicked out of the edge of the Milky Way, they don’t exactly know why it’s moving so fast.

”The origin of the cloud’s high velocity is certainly a matter of debate,” Fox says. “It could potentially be a dark matter halo that passed through the Galactic disk, accumulated gas, and continued on its journey.”