A Mushroom in

the Milky Way

This dramatic mushroom cloud, towering 1,000 light-years above the disk of
the Milky Way, was recently discovered
in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia by a team of Canadian astronomers. Some 12,000 light-years distant,
the cloud contains hydrogen atoms expelled from the Milky Ways disk by one
or more supernova explosions, possibly
aided by intense stellar winds from
blue-giant stars. Constrained by the
cold, relatively dense gas that pervades
the midplane of the galaxy, the expanding supernova bubble was channeled
upward and outward, creating a narrow
pillar of fast-flowing atoms that culminated in a broad, curling cap once it
reached the hot but rarefied galactic
halo. The cloud tops a list of recent discoveries from the ongoing Canadian Galactic Plane Survey, a five-year effort to
map approximately one-fifth of the
Milky Way at wavelengths near the 21centimeter emission line of atomic hydrogen. The survey, conducted at the
Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, will eventually
produce a complete, three-dimensional
view of gas within a region of the northern Milky Way that stretches from Cygnus to Perseus. Jayanne English (Space
Telescope Science Institute) presented
this image at the January American Astronomical Society meeting.

JAYANNE ENGLISH

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1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope May 1999

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