THE biggest smoke ring ever seen has been identified in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Smoke rings are a form of soliton, a type of wave discovered in 1834 by John Scott Russell, a Scottish engineer. While riding on horseback along the Union Canal at Glasgow, Russell saw a canal boat stop and noticed that the boat’s bow wave maintained its shape and energy for a long distance. The phenomenon was largely forgotten until the 1960s when the American physicist Martin Kruskal rediscovered Russell’s solitary wave and called it a “soliton”.
The cosmic smoke ring is a bizarre…
