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A picture of a recently discovered massive cloud of energetic particles. | Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; Visually: NASA/ESA/STSCI; Radio: Astron/Lofar; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Cloud
A huge cloud of energetic particles that surround a group of galaxies that existed about four billion years after the Big Bang could help scientists to find out how the early universe took on.
But was the halo of the massive galaxia heaps SAS104922.6+564032.5 and was 9.9 billion light years away from the earth and built by the outbreak of super massive black holes or a cosmic particle accelerator?
This shell of radio-emitting particles-a so-called “radio mini-helo”, although it is not really mini-is the farthest example of such a structure that has ever been detected. The distance is twice as high as with the longest radio mini-helo. The radio signal took 10 billion years to reach the earth, the majority of the 13.8 billion billion billions of lifespan of the universe.
The discovery made with the LOFAR-FOOK instrument in Europe (low frequency array) shows that galaxy clusters, which are some of the largest structures in the well-known universe, spend most of their existence in envelopes with energy-oriented particles.
This insight provides scientists a better idea of how energy flows around galaxy clusters. And that could in turn improve our image of cosmic evolution, said study members.
“It is astonishing to find such a strong radio signal at this distance,” said co-leader Roland Timmerman, an astronomer at Durham University in England. “It means that these energetic particles and the processes created for almost the entire history of the Galaxia Cluster Universe have shaped.”
What gave this cluster his halo?
The team made two possible explanations for the formation of this mini-helo.
One possibility is that the super massive black holes in the hearts of the galaxies in the cluster jets out of energy -rich particles and settle around their home cluster.
However, a problem with this theory is to explain how these particles have managed to maintain their energy if they take their place in a gigantic cloud.
Illustration of a super -massive black hole in the heart of a galaxy that emits a stream of energy -fashioned particles | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)
The second possible explanation is the existence of a natural particle collider around the galactic cluster.
Particles in the hot ionized gas or plasma around the cluster can beat together at almost light speeds, which leads to high energetic particles in the halo.
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The team behind the new research believes that their results offer a rare chance of observing a galaxy cluster shortly after it has formed.
It also indicates that galactic clusters have been filled with energetic particles over billions of years longer than previously assumed. And according to the scientists, another examination of this distant radio mini-helo should result exactly where these charged particles were created.
The team’s research was adopted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, whereby a Preprint version is available on the Research Repository Arxiv.
