Esa, illustrious
Simulation of the “cosmic web”, the vast network of filaments that extends throughout the universe
Astronomers discovered a huge hot gas filament that connects four galaxy swarms. With a mass 10 times larger than our galaxy, the filament may contain some of the “missing” matter in the universe, solving a mystery of decades.
More than one-live from the “normal” matter of the local universe-the visible material that constitutes the stars, the planets, the galaxies and the life-is missing.
Has not yet been seen, but it is necessary for our Cosmos models work correctly.
These models suggest that this elusive matter can exist in long gas chainsor filaments, which connect the denser zones of space.
Although we have seen filaments earlier, it is difficult to distinguish its properties; they are tenuous tipicamenmaking it difficult to isolate your light from any galaxies, black holes and other nearby objects.
A new investigation is now one of the first to do it, finding and characterizing accurately A single hot gas filament that extends between Four swarms of galaxies Not close universe.
The discovery was presented in a published last week in the magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“For the first time, our results correspond exactly What we see in our main cosmos model – something that had never happened before, ”says the main author of the study, Constantine Migkasresearcher at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
“It seems that the simulations were right from the beginning,” the astronomer adds.
Xmm-Newton is dealing with the case
With a temperature of more than 10 million degrees, the filament contains about 10 times the mass of the Milky Way And it turns on four galaxy swarms: two on one end and two in the other.
All are part of the Superenxame de Shapleya set of over 8000 galaxies that forms one of the most massive structures in the near universe.
The filament extends diagonally away from us Through supernxame over 23 million light years, the equivalent to crossing the Milky Way from end to end about 230 times.
Konstantines and his colleagues characterized the filament by combining XMM-Newton and Suzaku X-ray observations, and analyzing optical data from many others.
The two X -ray telescopes were Ideal partners. The Suzaku mapped the fienue x-ray light of the filament in a vast region of the space, while XMM-Newton identified with great accuracy X-ray contaminating sources-namely supermassive black holes-which were inside the filament.
“Thanks to the XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing more,” adds co-author Florian Pacaudfrom the University of Bona, Germany.
“Our approach was really successful and reveals that the filament is Exactly what we expected of our best simulations in the large -scale universe ”.
ESA/XMM-Newton and Isas/Jaxa
The new filament that connects four galaxy swarms: two at one end and two in the other. These swarms are visible as bright points at the bottom and upper of the filament (four white points surrounded by color)
Not truly missing
In addition to revealing a huge and never seen before the filament that crosses the nearby cosmos, the discovery shows how some of the denser and extreme structures in the universe – galaxies – are connected over colossal distances.
It also sheds light on its own nature of the “cosmic web”the vast and invisible web of filaments that is on the basis of the structure of everything we see around us.
“This investigation is an excellent example of collaboration between telescopes and creates a new reference on how to detect light from the ending filaments of the cosmic web,” he adds Norbert SchartelScientist of the ESA XMM-Newton Project.
“More fundamentally, reinforces our default cosmos model And valid decades of simulations: it seems that the ‘missing’ matter may be really hidden in filaments that are difficult to see, tissues through the universe. ”
ESA’s Euclid Mission aims to obtain a precise image of the cosmic web. Launched in 2023, the mission is exploring the structure and history of this web.
The mission is also under investigation of the nature of dark matter and dark energy – None of which was ever observedAlthough they represent impressive 95% of the universe – and working with other dark universe detectives to solve some of the largest and oldest cosmic mysteries.
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