Fess up: which one of you Galaxies made all that gas?

It's not yet fully operational, but the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is already giving astro-boffins surprises. With one-sixth of its antennas operational, and only a quarter of the beam-aiming of the final facility, the Pathfinder has helped a group of astronomers to work out that there's a surprising …

[Neil Barnes]

A gas cloud with the mass of a hundred billion suns...

I think you've had enough beans, boys!

[chivo243]

Re: A gas cloud with the mass of a hundred billion suns...

Either that or cosmic cabbage, hard boiled eggs and beer!

[Andy The Hat]

Data data data

Just wait until the whole thing comes on line and the data lines and storage arrays start to feel the heat of beeelions of phonabytes of data ...

(1 phonabyte = 1 teenager's phone data per second)

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct your correction

A billion "sons"? Really?

[Grikath]

Re: Correct your correction

well the galaxies obviously aren't dead, so would be quite prolific... ;)

[Mihai]

And then correct the correction of the correction

One billion instead of one hundred billion is "an order of magnitude" ? C'mon sons :)

[gazthejourno]

Re: And then correct the correction of the correction

Alright alright, that'll do.

[iLuddite]

ah, those crazy astronomers

A galaxy, even a small uninteresting one, has a lot of stars and, potentially, a Sagan_number of sentient aliens. It takes an astronomer with the Big View to say that not much is happening there.

[Matt Langley]

+Correction The original version of this story said "a hundred billion sons", which Paolo Serra has corrected to "a billion suns". A billion sons would exhaust even a galaxy of mothers.

[x 7]

I don't understand.....how does atomic hydrogen remain stable? Why doesn't it form hydrogen gas?

[Martin Budden]

I assume because each atom is a looong way from the next atom, so the chances of them bumping into each other are tiny?

[x 7]

thats the only explanation I could think of, but given the age of the universe -and so the increased chances of molecules colliding it seems unlikely. However if it IS the reason, its another indication of just how mindboggling big space is