Scientists found a wave of ultra hot gas bigger than the Milky Way
Big waves keep on rolling. Perseus Galaxy Cluster keep on burning.
Scientists found a wave of hot gas twice the size of the Milky Way in the Perseus galaxy cluster that they believe is billions of years old.
The study, which is published in the June 2017 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory with radio observations and computer simulations.
Perseus, named after its host constellation, is 240 million light years away and is made of gas burning so hot it can only glow in X-rays. While studying the burning gas, Chandra found many interesting things, but focused on an enigmatic concave called the “bay.”
After combining 10.4 days worth of high-resolution Chandra data with 5.8 days of wide-field observations, the team had created an X-ray image of the gas in Perseus. They then filtered the data to highlight the more subtle details and compared the enhanced image to computer simulations of merging galaxy clusters.
The simulation shows gas in a large cluster settling into a “cold” central region of around 54 million degrees Fahrenheit (30 million degrees Celsius), the area around that where the gas is triple the heat, and on the very outskirts is a smaller galaxy with a thousand times the mass of the Milky Way.
After 2.5 billion years, the gas had already risen 500,000 light years from the center when the flyby disrupted the gas and caused the 200,000 light year-sized wave rolling for hundreds of millions of years before dissolving.
These waves are a larger scaled Kelvin-Helmholtz wave, the waves caused by a velocity difference of two fluids, like waves on the water.
Source:http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/05/gas-wave-in-perseus-cluster