Discovery of the “Eos” cloud in far-ultraviolet emission reveals an elusive structure in interstellar space
An international team of scientists led by an astrophysicist from Rutgers University in New Brunswick has discovered a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen that could be a future “star factory.” It is one of the largest and closest structures to the solar system ever detected.
The cloud, nicknamed “Eos” – after the Greek goddess of dawn – was detected by far-ultraviolet emission from molecular hydrogen. This is the first time such emission has been directly detected, providing evidence of a structure in which molecules glow in the dark. The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“This is the first molecular cloud discovered by direct detection of far-field ultraviolet radiation from molecular hydrogen,” said Blakeslee Burkhardt, a professor at the Rutgers Institute for Physics and Astronomy and a research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Platon Institute. “It really glows in the dark.”
Molecular clouds, composed mainly of gas, dust and hydrogen, are the fertile ground on which stars form. Until now, they have been discovered mainly using methods based on carbon monoxide radiation in the radio and infrared, but “Eos” is an example of a hydrogen-rich cloud that does not emit CO radiation, and therefore has escaped the attention of researchers until now.
The Aeolian cloud is about 300 light-years away, on the edge of the local bubble surrounding the solar system. Its area in the sky is about the size of 40 full moons and its mass is estimated at about 3,400 solar masses. According to models, it will evaporate in about 6 million years.
“The discovery opens a new chapter in the study of interstellar space,” added Thabisha Dharmawardena, a NASA Hubble Space Telescope research associate at New York University. “Using the deep ultraviolet technique, we can reveal hidden clouds further out at the edges of the galaxy.”
The data was collected using the FIMS-SPEAR far-ultraviolet spectrograph on the Korean satellite STSAT-1, and was first released to the public in 2023.
The findings highlight the importance of innovative observational methods for finding hidden structures in space. Prof. Burkhardt concluded: “The story of the universe is a story of the rearrangement of atoms over billions of years. The hydrogen in the ‘Eos’ cloud came to us from the Big Bang – a journey of 13.6 billion years.”
לThe scientific article
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