It has dimensions of 2 million light-years and a diameter

Abigail Brewer 2 years ago 2 min read

The Spherical radio telescope, five hundred meters aperture (fast) Discover an atomic cloud twenty times larger than the Milky Way: With a diameter of 2 million light-years, it is the largest ever in space.

This cloud has been found In the fifth for Stefana group of galaxies located about 10,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus.

Xu Cong, lead author of this research and who leads the team from China’s National Astronomical Observatories, explained to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong that the astronomers wanted to use FAST sensitivity to better understand how galaxies interacted with each other when they came together. For the first time as a group.

to achieve your goal, I searched for hydrogen atoms in the area around Stephan’s PentagramThese particles emit a unique “signature” that can reveal information about events that occurred long ago.

How did they find this atomic cloud?

This discovery became possible after FAST, located in the Chinese province of Guizhou, targeted the galaxy cluster, which was identified in recent days after the James Webb Space Telescope photographed Stephan’s Quintet.

Galaxies collide in Stefan’s quintet, pulling and stretching each other in a gravitational dance. In the mid-infrared view here, watch how the dust web pierces through, giving new insight into how interactions like these drove the evolution of galaxies in the early universe. pic.twitter.com/3P15LMCCOH

– NASA’s Web Telescope (NASAWebb) 12 July 2022

Shaw expressed: “It was a difficult task due to the weak signals from the atoms and the large area observed, but a well-tuned FAST receiver and giant dish, the size of 30 football fields, made it possible.“.

The researchers were surprised to see a giant gaseous structure like this, Being in turn unusually far from the center of a pentagalactic, where hydrogen atoms tend to accumulate.

The academic planted ambiguity in the study: “We wonder why it still exists, as the low-density atomic gas should have been destroyed by ultraviolet radiation in the cosmic background, according to current theories.“.