From the «previously invisible» department:
Feed: SoylentNews
Title: Massive Invisible Structure Discovered, by Accident, with Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia
Author: martyb
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2021 22:14:00 -0400
Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/07/07/2018203&from=rss

TheMightyChickadee[1] writes:

From the Weather section of WOWK TV[2],

The astronomers at the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) discovered a massive, previously unknown structure in the Milky Way Galaxy that is quite eye opening.

The first discovery happened with a smaller telescope but because it was so unexpected that they had to bring in the big one, the 20-meter telescope, to confirm what they were observing.

Sometimes, in our galaxy, not everything is visible to the naked eye and that’s what is happening here. This discovery is being seen through the use of
radio spectrum. Essentially, the astronomers are able to see things with the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope. Since the GBT has a high level of sensitivity, it was able to detect this extremely large structure that’s made up of molecular gas, versus a physical moon or planet. Right now, the people doing the research believe the structure extends far into the distant parts of the Milky Way Galaxy.


The Green Bank Observatory has more on the technical aspects of this massive structure:

In 2012, astronomer Ron Allen, a professor with the Physics and Astronomy Department of Johns Hopkins University, unexpectedly found OH emission
without corresponding CO emission while working on an unrelated project. As
OH is also a gas molecule that occurs in clouds of molecular H2, this
finding hinted that there might be an abundant portion of H2 not traced by
CO, also referred to as “CO-dark” molecular gas.

Allen worked with Dave Hogg of National Radio Astronomy Observatory to
create a new research program using the GBT to observe OH as an alternative tracer of H2. Philip Engelke, a new Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins
University, joined the project soon after. In 2015, the first results of
this research were published, showing that OH indeed traces the “CO-Dark” component of H2 remarkably well. While it required long exposure times, the
OH observations began filling in the gaps between previous CO observations, showing molecular gas as a major component in the structure of our Galaxy.


Yes, it is all about the OH.

Journal Reference:
Michael P. Busch, Philip D. Engelke, Ronald J. Allen, et al . Observational Evidence for a Thick Disk of Dark Molecular Gas in the Outer GalaxyThe Astrophysical Journal Volume 914, Number 1; (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/0004-637X/914/1[3])

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Original Submission[4]

Read more of this story[5] at SoylentNews.

Links:
[1]: http://soylentnews.org/~TheMightyChickadee/ (link)
[2]: https://www.wowktv.com/weather/massive-invisible-galactic-structure-discovered-by-accident-with-green-bank-telescope-in-west-virginia/ (link)
[3]: https://doi.org/https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/0004-637X/914/1 (link) [4]: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=49721 (link)
[5]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/07/07/2018203&from=rss (link)



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