UNC-CH PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM
Robin Shelton, University of Georgia
“A Trainwreck of Cosmic Proportions: High Velocity Clouds of Gas Traveling into and through our Galaxy”
Astronomical observations have found enormous gas clouds near our Milky Way Galaxy. Some of the clouds are as large as dwarf galaxies with as much mass as 100 million Suns. Others are only a thousandth of that size. Some are in the rarefied outskirts of our Galaxy while others are poised to collide with the Galactic disk. Many of these clouds travel though space at more than 100 kilometers per second and are currently interacting with our Galaxy. My group has been computationally modeling these fast-moving clouds, called high velocity clouds (HVCs), in order to determine how they affect our Galaxy and how our Galaxy affects them. In this presentation, I will show how HVCs behave on timescales of hundreds of millions of years and what happens when they collide with the dense gas in our Galaxy’s disk.