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THEY are cosmic "bullets", bigger than our solar system, far faster than the speed of sound and filled with enough iron to satisfy China's needs for eternity.

But just what sort of gun fired them? No one really knows.

Astronomers were crowing yesterday over the sharpest pictures yet taken of mysterious fingers of gas streaking through space 1500 light years from Earth.

Discovered more than 15 years ago by two Australians, Michael Burton and the late David Allen, they continue to astound scientists.

Dr Burton, from the University of NSW, said yesterday the bullets were "knots of very dense gas ejected from the core of the Orion nebula, a region of star formation".

Ten times larger than our solar system and streaking out at 400 kilometres a second, they are "fast enough to travel from Canberra to Sydney in less than a second", Dr Burton said.

The shock of the gas bullets slamming into the nebula's much bigger fog of hydrogen heats them to 5000 degrees, causing their iron atoms to glow brightly - blue in the image taken by Hawaii's giant eight-metre Gemini telescope.

Trailing each bullet is a brownish wake of hydrogen.

Dr Burton said the volume of glowing iron was "a lot more than in Mount Tom Price [Western Australia]. There is enough raw material in a single bullet to meet our needs forever, but for sure it's not going to be easy to pick up."

What sent the bullets on their way is "one of the things we still don't know". Perhaps they had been tossed out during a close encounter between two or three young massive stars. Whatever it was, it must have been "some kind of catastrophic event" in the last few thousand years.

Full article here
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