© Lloyd

Hot Galactic Plasma Balls Form Cold Radial Galactic Filaments

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanormalBuffalo/messages/85~

_Filaments stretch[] outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275
_Some filaments extend in radial lines outward from the galaxy center, while others appear as horseshoe shapes.
_NGC 1275, 235 million light-years [away in] the Perseus [galaxy] cluster, has [] filaments [] of gas much cooler than the surrounding intergalactic cloud
_[Something] heated up the gas [in the galaxy] to about [] 40 million Kelvin [making it plasma], which in turn produces glowing bubbles that float outward from the galaxy center.
_The bubbles pull colder gas outward behind them in the form of the trailing filaments.
_The cold gas is pushed out by waves of radiation emanating from [] the center of the galaxy.
_New images from the Hubble Space Telescope showed individual gas threads bundled together within the filaments
_The filaments, about 1,500 light-years wide and hundreds of thousands of light-years long, are themselves made of finer threads, smaller structures about 200 light-years wide and 20,000 light-years long.
_NGC 1275 [is] just the closest example of many objects that could have filament structures.
_Each thread contains as much mass as one million Suns.
_Weak magnetic fields, about one-ten-thousandth as strong as the Earth's field, exert enough force on the charged particles in the threads to keep [the threads] together.
_Cold gas within the filaments could normally begin to condense and start forming stars, but the filaments' magnetic fields push against the gravitational pressure and prevent star-birth.

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The above was condensed from the following.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanormalBuffalo/messages/85~
_#85942 From: LordOfThyNight@... Date: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:18 am Subject: Hubble Images Solve Galactic Filament Mystery
_Hubble Images Solve Galactic Filament Mystery By KENNETH CHANG Published: August 21, 2008
_A tangle of spidery filaments stretches outward from the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 as if they were dendrites of an intergalactic nerve cell.
_Magnetic Support of the Optical Emission Line Filaments in NGC 1275 (Nature)NGC 1275, located 235 million light-years from Earth near the center of a clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster, has posed a puzzle:
_How have these filaments, which are made of gas much cooler than the surrounding intergalactic cloud, persisted for perhaps 100 million years?
_Why haven't they warmed, dissipated or collapsed to form stars?
_Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with 10 times the resolution of earlier photographs, reveal that the filaments, about 1,500 light-years wide and hundreds of thousands of light-years long, are themselves made of finer threads, smaller structures about 200 light-years wide and 20,000 light-years long.
_The cold gas is pushed out by waves of radiation emanating from the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy.
_Each thread contains as much mass as one million Suns.
_With the new information, a team led by Andrew C. Fabian calculated that weak magnetic fields, about one-ten-thousandth as strong as the Earth's field, exert enough force on the charged particles in the threads to keep them together, thus perhaps answering the puzzle.
_"The things tie together very well," Dr. Fabian said.
_The findings appear in the Aug. 21 issue of the journal Nature.
.
_#85943 From: LordOfThyNight@... Date: Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:18 am
_Space 'Ropes' Hang Together by Threads By Jeremy Hsu Staff Writer posted: 20 August 2008 01:01 pm ET
_Scientists have discovered the forces that bind together a strange network of 100-million-year-old, rope-like gas filaments that extend from an enormous elliptical galaxy.
_The filaments presented a puzzle because they should normally collapse under the pressure of the hotter surrounding gas.
_New images from the Hubble Space Telescope showed individual gas threads bundled together within the filaments, which allowed researchers to estimate the magnetic fields necessary to hold everything together.
_"When you see a piece of rope from a distance it looks solid, but when you look closely there's a lot of threads," said Andrew Fabian.
_Previous images of the galaxy NGC 1275 barely showed bits of the filaments, but Hubble's snapshots improved the view with 10 times more detail.
_Individual threads now appear to stretch about 20,000 light-years.
_"It's not an astounding surprise, but the thing we can do is calculate the magnitude of the magnetic field from the size of the filaments," Fabian told SPACE.com.
_"Everything checks out." The filaments may represent the most visible effect of the galaxy's central black hole on its gaseous surroundings.
_The black hole's high-energy jets have heated up the gas to about 70 million degrees Fahrenheit (40 million Kelvin), which in turn produces glowing bubbles that float outward from the galaxy center.
_The bubbles pull colder gas outward behind them in the form of the trailing filaments.
_Some filaments extend in radial lines outward from the galaxy center, while others appear as horseshoe shapes.
_Cold gas within the filaments could normally begin to condense and start forming stars, but the filaments' magnetic fields push against the gravitational pressure and prevent star-birth.
_Fabian and his study coauthors from the U.K. and United States see NGC 1275 as just the closest example of many objects that could have filament structures.
_"It's known that many distant, massive galaxies are surrounded by nebulae of gas which must be filamentary or clumpy," Fabian noted.
_"We think similar filaments are there in those distant objects."