Cosmic cloud in galactic 'no-man's land'
Astronomers find a mysterious cloud bigger than the Milky Way.
The orphan cloud is the blue umbrella-shaped part of this image, which is color-coded to show the X-ray part of the cloud in blue, the warm gas in red and the visible region in white. Credit: European Space Agency / XMM-Newton.
In a first-of-its-kind discovery, US researchers have spotted a cosmic cloud bigger than our own Milky Way, floating alone in a cluster of galaxies tenuously bound together by gravity.
This ‘orphan’ cloud has a mass 10 billion times greater than our own Sun and is made up of searing-hot gas with temperatures up to 10 million degrees Kelvin. It is believed to have been formed within one of the galaxies in the cluster and then stripped out, though researchers are puzzling over how it has survived on its own for so long instead of dissipating.
“This is an exciting and also a surprising discovery,” says Ming Sun, physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, US.
Sun is the lead author of the new study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which describes how the cloud was accidentally found using the European Space Agency’s (ESA) X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton), a space observatory currently in orbit around the Earth.
More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/cosmic-cloud-in-galactic-no-mans-land/
