October 20 Meeting of the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club

GAAC is a week later than usual this month! The Oct 20 meeting, 8:00 pm at the Lanesville Community Center, will be well-worth the wait, with Dr. Bill Waller and a presentation titled “Surfing the Galactic Froth.”

This is pretty cool. As it turns out, space is not so empty after all, but instead is shot through with frothy stuff.

According to Dr. Waller, this phenomenon arises mostly from microscopic grains of dust, irradiated and warmed by stars within our Galaxy’s disk, and concentrated in nebular regions of recent star formation and subsequent stellar death.

There’s a lot we can learn from these complex emissions, which provide a record of processes that have structured and powered supposedly empty interstellar space for the past 100 million years. Some of these features can be described in terms of “filaments,” “loops,” and “shell fragments,” while others appear more random – appearances that are…