Monthly Archives January 2021

MAS February Monthly Meeting

The Mysterious Radiation Field in the Milky Way (and Other Galactic Surprises)

Dr. Bob Benjamin

Our Milky Way Galaxy is an “island” of stars, interstellar gas, and dark matter in the vast expanses of intergalactic space. In this talk, I will focus on the interstellar (mostly hydrogen) gas. This gas fills the space between the stars, and some fraction of it is ionized: radiation from the stars has enough energy to remove the electron from the proton. By studying the resulting emission lines from this gas with the Wisconsin H-alpha Mapper, we have discovered that the central parts of the Milky Way are permeated by an unusual radiation field. I describe how we ended up making the discovery and why it is significant...

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