The phrase
"neutral hydrogen" refers to hydrogen gas that does not have any electrical charge. Normally, hydrogen atom has one electron and one proton, which are balanced in charge. However, when the electron is removed, the hydrogen atom becomes charged and is called an ion. So,
neutral hydrogen means hydrogen that is not an ion and has a balanced charge.
Full definition
In the spectrum, the team found evidence of a large concentration
of neutral hydrogen clouds close to the galaxy, indicating the presence of a giant cluster of embryonic galaxies.
The solid parts of the cheese represent places farther removed from the radiation,
where neutral hydrogen still exists.
But proof had to wait for a satellite sensitive enough to separate the
faint neutral hydrogen breeze from the other particles in the solar wind.
Later, Wolfe moved into observational astronomy and was one of the key leaders in using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, pioneering the use of quasar spectra to study concentrations of
neutral hydrogen gas in «damped Lyman - alpha systems.»
In 2013, he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of his significant studies of
neutral hydrogen in our galaxy and others, and for his service to U.S. radio astronomy.
As our solar system slowly orbits around the galactic center, the sun's ultraviolet radiation carves out an egg - shaped region of ionized hydrogen atoms surrounded
by neutral hydrogen gas.
This had been predicted as a relic from when hot ionized plasma of the early universe first cooled sufficiently to
form neutral hydrogen and allow space to become transparent to light, and its discovery led to general acceptance among physicists that the Big Bang is the best model for the origin and evolution of the universe.
The shock wave then inflates and heats up the interstellar medium, which emits in the X-ray, and strips the electrons from
surrounding neutral hydrogen atoms to make ionised hydrogen gas.
Only after the universe had expanded (and cooled) enough, could a proton (positively charged) hang on to an electron (negatively charged) and
become neutral hydrogen (no electrical charge).
As the universe rapidly expanded, these particles cooled and coalesced
into neutral hydrogen gas during an era that is sometimes referred to as the dark ages — a period bereft of any sources of light.
Being able to examine extremely distant quasars, still surrounded by long - vanished
neutral hydrogen clouds, «means we're finally probing into the Dark Ages,» Schneider says.
Astronomers expect that PaST will reveal a uniform haze of bright
neutral hydrogen at about 200 million years after the big bang that became increasingly punctuated by bubbles of ionized — and thus dark — hydrogen surrounding the first stars.
«It's not where the star formation is, and to see so much gas that far from the star - forming region means there is a large amount of
neutral hydrogen around the galaxy,» Neeleman said.
As more stars turned on throughout the universe, their photons reacted
with neutral hydrogen, ionizing the gas and setting off what's known as the epoch of re-ionization.
As the first stars flickered on, their ultraviolet light
excited neutral hydrogen atoms around them, causing the gas to emit a faint radio signal at 1,420 megahertz.
As the CMB photons traveled through the
interstellar neutral hydrogen around the time the first stars came to life, a fingerprint of stellar birth was embedded in these photons.
Loeb, meanwhile, is also working on the next big frontier in cosmology, using
neutral hydrogen observations to explore an even earlier chapter in cosmic history: the dark ages before star formation.
Observations of the galaxies are indirect in that a number - count decreases
when neutral hydrogen gas obscures their light.
Neutral hydrogen emits radiation at a frequency of 1,420 MHz, but thanks to the ongoing expansion of the Universe and the Doppler Effect, that radiation shifts to a lower frequency.
Observation, and theoretical evidence suggests that the LMC and SMC have been greatly distorted by tidal interaction with the Milky Way as they orbit around it; streams of
neutral hydrogen connect them to the Milky Way and to each other, and both resemble disrupted barred spiral galaxies.
If clouds of hydrogen also cluster around quasars — which convert all
nearby neutral hydrogen to invisible ionized gas — then quasars must have ionized more hydrogen than astronomers had assumed, Savaglio says.
When the temperature dropped about 400,000 years after the Universe's birth, the nucleon and electron combined to
make neutral hydrogen atoms.
The analysis of a distinctive feature (i.e., the wing feature) between 8000 - 8400 Å (in the vicinity of this Lyman - alpha line near GRB) contributed to the estimate of the ratio of
neutral hydrogen relative to the entire amount of hydrogen.
Such clouds formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the cosmos cooled sufficiently to allow charged protons and electrons to bind together to form
electrically neutral hydrogen atoms.
But Zaritsky points out that such searches will fail if the hydrogen is ionised — that is, stripped of its single electron — because
only neutral hydrogen atoms produce radio waves.
[2] Neutral hydrogen gas absorbs all the high - energy ultraviolet light emitted by hot young stars very efficiently.
The intense ultraviolet light from this era caused this
murky neutral hydrogen to get excited and ionize, or gain electric charge, and the gas has remained in that state since that time.
The Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) is a method for increasing the plasma temperature and driving currents in magnetically - confined fusion plasmas by
injecting neutral hydrogen / deuterium beams.
The principle idea is to use a radio telescope to
map neutral hydrogen, which emits or absorbs radio waves with a wavelength of 21 centimeters.
Lockman points out that some additional factor has to be involved to
get neutral hydrogen to such large distances from the Galactic plane.
What the GBT was able to pin down was a population of 20
discrete neutral hydrogen clouds, together with an extended filamentary component, which, the astronomers believe, are both associated with Andromeda.
But when the black hole was formed, the universe was comprised of about 50 percent ionized (or energized) hydrogen and 50
percent neutral hydrogen.
They find clouds of hydrogen, but almost no detectable clouds of
neutral hydrogen drifting between galaxies, meaning the gas was at some point reionized.
However, the universe took 300,000 years to cool sufficiently
for neutral hydrogen and helium gas to form, with traces of lithium and beryllium atoms (at around a redshift of z ~ 1,000).
This mass die - off generated very energetic X-rays, boosting the temperature of the
ambient neutral hydrogen, cutting off its characteristic CMB absorption frequency.
Within a half a billion years or so, not
much neutral hydrogen was left around the stars and the quasars at the center of coalescing proto - galaxies.
Even before they first detected the emission from
neutral hydrogen in 1951, astronomers were aware of interstellar gas.
Thus, more than 35 years after it was predicted, J1030 was finally found in the early period of the universe
where neutral hydrogen gas still existed in quantities sufficient to be detected.
After a few hundred thousand years, things cooled enough so that protons and electrons could combine to
form neutral hydrogen.
The original motivation for building the SKA was to
detect neutral hydrogen gas in normal galaxies at very early epochs in the Universe.
So, in theory, scientists should not have been able to detect the Lyman - alpha line of an ancient galaxy such as EGS8p7 — as it would have been absorbed by the
surrounding neutral hydrogen gas.
Most of what astronomers have learned about the large - scale structure and motions of the Galaxy has been derived from the radio waves of
interstellar neutral hydrogen.
Phrases with «neutral hydrogen»