I learned about the Smith Cloud today via the video below from NASA. It’s a gas cloud the mass of about 2 million Suns (not much astronomically), moving at a high velocity of about 700,000 miles per hour. It’s one of many circling the Milky Way, but one that is coming back to collide with the Milky Way. When it does, it’ll just kind of merge in and cause a lot of new stars to form from all the gas and energy it carries, not much more. Boring, with a slightly mysterious history likely unraveled, unless you look at it in a different way with a scientifically apt metaphor…

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