| Description: | It is so much fun to look at the clouds in the sky! If you watch carefully, you can see a dog, a cat, an elephant... Well, watching the hydrogen sky of our Galaxy can be fun too. Here one can see a sample of the Galactic marine life -- a dolphin, obviously jumping through an unseen loop...
This is a channel view (i. e. with a fixed doppler-shift velocity) of one of the several Galactic HI halo clouds observed with the combination of the VLA D-array and the GBT (to provide the short-spacing information) telescopes, achieving ~1 arcmin resolution. It can be estimated that the cloud is ~8 kpc away from us and is located ~700 pc below the Galactic plane. The total length of the "dolphin" is ~30 pc and the cumulative hydrogen mass this cloud contains is a few hundred solar masses. If the superbubble hypothesis of the halo cloud origin is true, what we see here may be a deformed piece of a compressed shell, and the "fins" could have been created by Rayleigh-Taylor and gravitational instabilities that have been tearing it apart. |
