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The CNET article Interstellar comet Borisov looks ordinary, making Oumuamua even weirder says:. A paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy lays out the early data on Borisov, which is just the second-ever object seen visiting our solar system from beyond.
The title of the question asks about interstellar space, but the body asks about the interstellar medium. These are two very different questions. The temperature of the interstellar medium varies widely, from a few kelvins to over ten million kelvins. By all accounts, the vast majority of the interstellar medium is at least "warm", where "warm ...
I recently watched Interstellar with some friends and we didn't come to the same conclusion. In my opinion, the portal they use to go to the other galaxy (to visit the three planets) is not a black hole. My friends tell me it is. (warning, contains spoiler!!) To me, it's not because of these points:
While it’s true that 98% of the interstellar gas is hydrogen and helium, dust is composed of the last 2%. That is, iron, carbon, silicon, oxygen, etc. 🚫 Finally, while it’s true that blue light is absorbed or scattered more efficiently by dust than red light, dust doesn’t emit blue light. If it’s absorbed, the energy goes into ...
The interstellar medium (ISM) is, as you say, the gas (and dust) in between the stars, within a galaxy. It consists of molecular, neutral and ionized gas, with densities ranging from $\sim 10^{-3}$ to $\sim 10^{6}$ particles per cm $^{3}$ and temperatures ranging from a few K up to 10,000 or 20,000 K. The molecular gas is the coldest and ...
The difference in density is huge, with interstellar medium density at an average of $\rho ∼ 1\ ppcm$ (one proton per cubic centimeter), but the density of these WHIM being even a few orders of magnitude lower at $\rho ∼ 10^{−6}−10^{−5}\ ppcm$, or roughly 1 to 10 protons per cubic meter (NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory quotes average ...
One striking example of this that has seems counter-intuitive, is the angular size displayed for the black hole "Gargantua" in the movie Interstellar. The characters in the movie are so close to it that it can be fully displayed in great detail (see attached image: Black hole seems to cover almost/over 90 degrees of the field of view..!)
The interstellar medium is a multiphase medium, and you can find (some references in this lecture and in this thesis manuscript (this one is in French, but numbers are international)): the hot ionized medium (HIM) with density as low as 10^-3 cc (particles per cubic centimeter); the warm ionized medium (WIM), with density of the order of 0.03 cc;
In astronomy, there is no formal definition of the threshold between gas and dust. Gas can be monoatomic, diatomic, or molecular (or made of photons, in principle). Molecules can be very large, and in principle, dust particles are just very large molecules. I've seen various authors use various definitions, ranging from ∼ 100 ∼ 100 to ∼ ...
At least four factors resist the compression of an interstellar gas cloud, and those factors must be overcome by gravity before star formation can begin. Third, everything in the Universe rotates. As a gas cloud begins to contract, it spins more and more rapidly, just as ice-skaters spin faster as they pull in their arms.