Giant invisible clouds found near the earth

Until now, huge molecular clouds hidden from scientists have been discovered from our solar system for 300 light years. This hydrogen-rich structure, with the dawn Greek goddess “EOS”, can change our understanding of star formation and interstellar space.

An international team led by Blakesley Burkhart, a New Brunswick astrophysicist at Rutgers University, made a breakthrough discovery through innovative methods – detecting hydrogen molecules through its ultraviolet light, rather than relying on traditional carbon-monoxide signatures.

“This is the first molecular cloud found by looking for ultraviolet emission from molecular hydrogen,” Burkhart said. “The data show that luminescent hydrogen molecules detected by fluorescence in far-ultraviolet light. This cloud actually glows in the dark.”

EOS is very large – spanning about 40 moons across the night sky and about 3400 times the mass of our sun. Despite its huge size, clouds have not been discovered yet because it is primarily a “coating” and there is little carbon monoxide traditionally used to discover such formed carbon.

Crescent-shaped clouds are located at the edge of local bubbles, a gas-filled cavity containing our solar system. Scientists estimate it will evaporate in about 6 million years, but in its lifetime, EOS offers astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to study molecular gas dynamics at close range.

“When we browse the telescope, we capture the entire solar system in the behavior of formation, but we don’t know how that happens,” explains Burkhart. “Our discovery of EOS is exciting because we can now directly measure the formation and separation of molecular clouds, and how the Milky Way begins to convert interstellar gas and dust into stars and planets.”

Thavisha Dharmawardena, a NASA Hubble Fellow at New York University and co-first author of the study published in Nature Astronomy, highlighted the potential significance: “The use of the far ultraviolet fluorescence emission technique could rewrite our understanding of the interesting medium, uncovering hidden clouds across the galaxy and even out to the further detectable limits of cosmic dawn.”

This discovery is achieved by analyzing the data from the far-map spectrometer operated on the Korean satellite STSAT-1. The instrument breaks down UV light into its component wavelengths, creating spectroscopy scientists can analyze to detect molecules that are invisible by conventional methods.

What makes this discovery particularly striking is the ancient nature of hydrogen observed. “The story of the universe is a story that rearranges atoms over billions of years,” Burkhart said. “The hydrogen currently in the EOS cloud exists in the Big Bang and eventually lands on our galaxy and binds together near the sun. So the long journey of these hydrogen atoms is 13.6 billion years.”

Now, the team is searching for data to obtain near-distance molecular hydrogen clouds. Using the James Webb space telescope, they may have discovered the most distant molecular gas yet to be found, finding some of the closest and most distant hydrogen molecules from our sun, effectively booking their research.

This discovery not only expands our understanding of the molecular universe, but also shows how innovative observation techniques reveal the structure of the universe that has been hidden throughout sight.