From the January 2004 Scientific American Magazine | 0 comments

Our Growing, Breathing Galaxy ( Preview )

Long assumed to be a relic of the distant past, the Milky Way turns out to be a dynamic, living object

The story of HVCs began in the mid-1950s, when Guido M�nch of the California Institute of Technology discovered dense pockets of gas outside the plane--a clear exception to the rule that the density of gas diminishes with height. Left to themselves, those dense pockets should quickly dissipate, so in 1956 Lyman Spitzer, Jr., of Princeton University proposed that they were stabilized by a hot, gaseous corona that surrounded the Milky Way, a galactic-scale version of the corona around the sun [see "The Coronas of Galaxies," by Klaas S. de Boer and Blair D. Savage; Scientific American, August 1982].

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