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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hitomi X-ray space observatory (SN [soylentnews.org], March 28) "managed to make one crucial astronomical observation before the accident, capturing gas motions in a galaxy cluster in the constellation Perseus. The instrument that made the observation, a high-resolution spectrometer, had been in the works for three decades. Two earlier versions of it were lost in previous spacecraft failures." [Nature [nature.com]]

      Today Alexandra Witze reveals in Nature [nature.com] that observation reveals a galaxy cluster surprise.

      From the article:

From the last gasp of a failed satellite comes a brief glimpse of galaxies far, far away. Before it broke in March, one month after launch, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite managed to gaze at the Perseus galaxy cluster -- one of the Universe's most massive objects, 250 million light-years from Earth. And researchers discovered that superheated gas at the cluster's heart flows much more placidly than expected.

      Understanding how turbulence roils this gas allows astronomers to explore how galaxies form and evolve. "Clusters are one of our most important probes of cosmology," says Craig Sarazin, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who was not involved with the work.

      "Most of the gas in the Universe lies between galaxies," adds Andrew Fabian, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a member of the international team that reported its findings on 6 July in Nature [nature.com]. So Hitomi's peek into these areas could affect how scientists see most of the Universe's matter.

      [...]

      The new Hitomi measurements aren't quite as precise as they could have been, because the team had not gone through all its calibrations before losing the satellite, notes Elizabeth Blanton, an astronomer at Boston University in Massachusetts. But the Perseus work is likely to stand as Hitomi's primary scientific legacy.

      "Of course we had a programme planned to look at more clusters, and we would have carried on for the next few years had it only lived," says Fabian. "It feels like the door has been briefly opened, showing us a new and exciting landscape -- and it's been slammed in our face again."

      The next big X-ray telescope won't launch until at least 2028 when the ESA's ATHENA observatory is planned.

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