A ‘mystery’ of the universe may have finally been solved after scientists made a shocking find that is ‘10 times’ bigger than our galaxy.
This comes as astronomers discovered a huge filament of hot gas that bridges across four galaxy clusters.
The gas is 10 times as big as our own galaxy and experts are now saying it could ‘contain some of the Universe’s missing matter, addressing a decades-long mystery’.
It was scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) who made the discovery using the XMM-Newton and JAXA’s Suzaku X-ray space telescopes.
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According to the space agency: “Over one-third of the ‘normal’ matter in the local Universe – the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life – is missing. It hasn’t yet been seen, but it’s needed to make our models of the cosmos work properly.”
However, astronomers now believe that this missing matter exists in long strings of gas, known as filaments, which are often faint and difficult to make out.
Lead researcher Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands said: “For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos – something that’s not happened before.
“It seems that the simulations were right all along.”
Co-author Florian Pacaud of the University of Bonn, Germany, added: “Thanks to XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing else.
“Our approach was really successful, and reveals that the filament is exactly as we’d expect from our best large-scale simulations of the Universe.”
Finding the universe’s ‘missing’ matter
Astronomers used both of the telescopes to work out where the filaments were, with Suzaku mapping the filament’s faint X-ray light over a wide region of space and XMM-Newton pinpointing very precisely contaminating sources of X-rays – namely, supermassive black holes – lying within the filament.
This find has also shed some new light on the nature of the ‘cosmic’ web, with the filaments acting as the subtle cobweb for the structure of the universe.
Norbert Schartel, who is an ESA XMM-Newton project scientist, said: “This research is a great example of collaboration between telescopes, and creates a new benchmark for how to spot the light coming from the faint filaments of the cosmic web.
“More fundamentally, it reinforces our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations: it seems that the ‘missing’ matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the Universe.”