Surprisingly hot galaxy cluster puts new twist on the evolution of these cosmic giants
Scientists have detected gas at least five times hotter inside a galaxy cluster from the early universe than previous theories predicted.
An extremely hot galaxy cluster in the early universe has baffled scientists. The cluster was already extremely hot when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old – that’s at least five times hotter than previous theories suggested that our universe could have existed at that time. The findings were detailed in A. new study Published on Monday in Nature,
Ph.D. “We did not expect to see such a hot cluster environment so early in cosmic history,” Daji Zhou said. candidate at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the paper, in a statement,
Zhou and his colleagues found that the gas that is spread among the 30 or so active galaxies in this cluster, known as SPT2349-56, is much hotter and more abundant than it should be. Zhou said, the gas is much hotter than the sun new scientists, And temperatures far hotter than those detected by many astronomers in present-day clusters.
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Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, Zhou and his team were able to look back into the early universe. Their findings show that more objects like SPT2349-56 were producing huge amounts of energy during a moment in the early history of the universe when scientists thought such objects did not.
The team doesn’t know why the gas is so hot, but future research to find out could help astronomers better understand how the universe, as we know it, evolved. “Understanding galaxy clusters is the key to understanding the largest galaxies in the universe,” which mostly reside in clusters, Scott Chapman, a professor at Dalhousie University and co-author of the new study, said in the same statement.
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