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A team of international researchers, led by a University of British Columbia astrophysicist, has discovered a young galaxy cluster that was producing hot gas at a rate five times hotter than previously theoretically thought possible.
It’s a discovery that is exciting astrophysicists, who say it could change how scientists view the early evolution of the universe after the Big Bang.
Published in the Nature journal on Monday, the study involved over two dozen researchers across the world, and looked at a galaxy cluster called SPT2349-56 around 12 billion light years away.
The researchers, led by UBC PhD candidate Dazhi Zhou, found there was a significant amount of hot gas being produced in the space between galaxies.
Zhou said that it was the first detection of such hot gas at such an early stage of the universe, given the galaxy cluster in question is considered “young” in space terms — having been formed a mere 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.
“It is kind of a big jump, like, in our understanding of how the universe works,” he told CBC News.
James Di Francesco, the director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, located just north of Victoria, says previous theoretical understandings were that galaxy clusters don’t become so hot so quickly.
Di Francesco said the gas between galaxies is generally expected to get hotter over time, as the galaxies go around in orbit and inject energy into the gas surrounding them.
“Something, though, has caused this gas in this very young cluster to heat up dramatically at a very early age,” said the astrophysicist, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“And so it is revolutionary, in the extent, that it is providing a new window in understanding how these clusters evolve and [it’s] going counter to our expectations.”
Early history of the universe
Zhou said the amount of hot gas found by researchers was only thought to exist billions of years after the SPT2349-56 galaxy cluster was formed.
Researchers made the discovery using a number of telescopes in Chile, which allowed them to peer into dark clouds, delve deeper into star formation and into the earliest time in our universe.
Zhou said the telescopes observe in short wavelengths called submillimetre and millimetre — colloquially, they’re called radio telescopes.
The scientist said they allowed the researchers to zoom in on how hot the gas exactly was, despite it being so far away from the Earth.
“When you use a radio telescope to observe the sky, we can see a tiny little shadow, and when there is sufficiently hot gas, this signal is pretty independent [of] the distance,” he said.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has released the first images of the universe taken with the world’s largest digital camera inside a massive telescope. Scientists say the ultra high-definition images will provide a groundbreaking survey of space.
A galaxy cluster refers to a collection of galaxies, with clusters and superclusters of galaxies that can contain anywhere from hundreds to thousands of these galaxies.
Our own Milky Way belongs to the Virgo supercluster, potentially home to more than 2,000 galaxies.
Zhou says the new research will be essential to understanding today’s massive galaxy clusters and how they form.
