| Title | Giant Flashlight Illuminates Cosmic Network | |
| Date | Tuesday January 20 2015, @04:49AM | |
| Author | LaminatorX | |
| Topic | ||
| from the billions-and-billions-of-stars dept. | ||
New Scientist is reporting Giant Flashlight Illuminates Cosmic Network:
The cobwebby filaments that stretched between galaxies in the early universe have shown themselves for the first time. Light from the activity of a distant supermassive black hole is serving as a giant cosmic flashlight, illuminating an enormous strand of gas held together by invisible dark matter.
[...] The geometry of large-scale cosmic structures helps us piece together the processes that formed the universe. Though this first glimpse mostly fits with existing models, there is one surprise that suggests some processes are currently missing in our understanding.
[...] They searched for some of the brightest sources of radiation in the universe: discs of hot gas surrounding supermassive black holes at the centres of distant galaxies, called quasars. When the light from these beacons shines on the gas in a cosmic filament, the gas can absorb and re-emit the light in another wavelength.
Detecting such light is still a challenge. The team had to build a custom filter tuned specifically to the wavelength of the light from each quasar, and put it on the camera of the 10-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii, one of the largest telescopes on Earth.
So it was a surprise when the first quasar [Sebastiano] Cantalupo [University of California, Santa Cruz] observed at Keck, called UM 287, shone on a filament right away. "It was a very lucky night," he says. "I thought these things might be extremely rare, and so was very surprised when my first night at Keck we detected this filament." It turned out he was right about their rarity: none of the 10 other quasars they observed revealed anything.
[...] However, the filament does contain one surprise: it is much more massive than simulations predicted, containing gas that weighs the equivalent of a thousand billion suns. "This is probably telling us that we are missing some physical processes in our models of intergalactic gas at large scales."
Archive.org has an abstract and full report (pdf) available.
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Giant Flashlight Illuminates Cosmic Network on 2024-05-09 22:15:57