Astronomers have discovered a "warehouse of building materials" for our galaxy

Star formation requires a continuous replenishment "stocks" of molecular clouds of hydrogen from external sources, without which the stars will fade gradually exhausting the reserves of the star of "fuel". The stars in our galaxy every year the amount of hydrogen is burned, which corresponds to 0.45 solar masses. It is believed that the source of gas may be a matter of intergalactic space. However, Nicolas Lehner (Nicolas Lehner) and Christopher Hawk (Christopher Howk) from Notre-Dame University, found that the main source of material to feed the new stars of the galactic halo is – "edge" of the Milky Way, extending beyond its visible part. This area is filled with a rarefied interstellar gas and clusters of invisible dark matter that does not "disperse" stars inside the galaxy. Researchers estimate that the total mass of such clouds is about 100 million solar masses, and the galactic disk in the year of "settling" of about 0.8-1.4 solar masses of hydrogen and other gases. This amount should be enough to fuel star formation. Scientists came to this conclusion by analyzing the behavior of the so-called "high" gas clouds in the halo. Unlike a fixed dark matter and interstellar gas clouds are moving at a speed of 90-170 km per second, more speed of the Sun relative to the center of the galaxy by 4-6 times. Gas clouds absorb and re-emit the rays of distant stars at a specific frequency that can uniquely identify their presence and their speed is calculated by how much radiation is shifted into the red – the 'far' or purple – the 'near' side of the spectrum. In 2008 and 2010, Lehner and Hawk found two such clouds at a distance of 26 and 49 thousand light years from our solar system. Near the cloud is within the galaxy and is full of metals and other heavy elements. Most likely, the researchers suggest, it has recently been thrown out of the Milky Way as a result of a supernova explosion or the pressure of solar wind emanating from the star-supergiant. In the second cloud, there are no significant concentrations of heavy elements – probably the molecular hydrogen in this cloud slowly "fall" of the galactic disk. Based on these data the authors developed a search algorithm, "high" clouds on the background of stars with a telescope "Hubble". This time they managed to find 14 of the clouds due to the fact that they were "illuminated" halo stars.