CKDU 88.1 FM
Hear a clip:
An international team of researchers, led by Canadian scientists, discovered a blazing cloud of gas in a galaxy cluster 12 billion light years away.
Temperatures in the galaxy cluster were five times hotter than theories predicted, in a cluster formed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.
The study, published Monday in Nature, was led by Dazhi Zhou, a PhD student in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia.
“Things are very rarely five times different than you expect in astronomy,” said Scott Champan, a professor at Dalhousie and the University of British Columbia. Chapman proposed, designed, and advised the project.
“We didn’t expect to see such a hot cluster atmosphere so early in cosmic history,” said Zhou in a statement released Monday. “In fact, at first I was skeptical about the signal as it was too strong to be real.”
Galaxy cluster SPT2349 was discovered in 2018, named after the south pole telescope and the cluster’s coordinates in the sky.
The cluster is 500,000 light years across, around the size of the halo surrounding the Milky Way. It contains over 30 active galaxies and forms stars over 5000 times faster than our galaxy.
“It was much more extreme than anything that had ever been found before. So we published this with a student here at Dalhousie in Nature… and then we’ve been studying it ever since,” said Chapman.
To study galaxy clusters, researchers focus on the intracluster medium, hot gas found throughout a galaxy cluster.
“This is proof of concept that it is possible to look at the hot gas, which is the holy grail of understanding clusters,” said Chapman. “And that opens up a whole new field of astronomy in being able to study what the origins of galaxy clusters might be like.”
Usually, gravitational energy heats the gas found throughout a galaxy cluster. But Chapman says the SPT2349 cluster would not have enough of that energy to be heated to extremely high temperatures.
Instead, researchers say three supermassive black holes mechanically heat the gas. “It’s kind of the smoking gun of what’s doing the extra heating that gravity can’t do in this case,” said Chapman.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this web story said the SPT2349 galaxy cluster was formed 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. SPT2349 was formed 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. This was an error.
Leave a Reply