In the Star Wars galaxy the underworld is where you might find a cantina, or some other wretched hive villany, to hire Bossk or IG-88 or Cad Bane to track down some wayward rebel scum. It turns out our own galaxy has its own underworld, but it’s very, very different. Here’s more from Centauri Dreams:
Intergalactic space is, I would assume, about as empty a place as could be. Yet new work out of the University of Sydney delves into just what we might find if we could see what’s out there. And it turns out that it is quite a lot. The university’s David Sweeney is lead author on a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers discuss what they describe as the ‘galactic underworld,’ which is comprised of the compact remnants of massive stars. In other words, stars that have collapsed onto themselves and produced neutron stars and black holes.
Remember that black holes and neutron stars form from stars more than eight times the size of our Sun. If less than about 25 times the mass of the Sun, the star forms a neutron star, its tiny sphere jammed with neutrons prevented from collapsing further by neutron degeneracy pressure. Sweeney and team say that thirty percent of the black holes and neutron stars out there have been completely ejected from the galaxy. Given the age of the galaxy, over 13 billion years, a vast number of such objects must have formed, the 30 percent ejected by the ‘kick’ induced by their creation in a supernova.
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