China Sky Eye latest scientific research results have discovered that the largest known gas in the universe is 20 times the scale of Milky Way .
According to CCTV News on October 19, an international astronomical research team led by Xu Cong, a researcher at the National Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a major article in the journal " Nature " on the same day. The article stated that when they used the "China Sky Eye" to observe the dense galaxy group " Stephen Five-layer Galaxy " and the hydrogen atomic gas in the surrounding sky, they discovered a huge atomic gas structure with a scale of about 2 million light years, which is 20 times larger than the Milky Way. In other words, this gas can hold 20 Milky Ways and is the largest atomic gas structure detected in the universe.
Stephen Five-layer Galaxy is a galaxy group about 280 million light-years away from the Earth. It was discovered in 1877. The discoverer was Edward Stephen. There are at least 5 galaxies of quite large size in this galaxy group , and 4 galaxies are colliding with each other. They are: NGC 7319, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B and NGC 7317. The galaxy matter movement is very active, so the light is very dazzling.
In February this year, scientists also observed that a shock wave with extremely strong energy was emitted from this galaxy cluster, with a speed of up to 5.4 million kilometers per hour, and its length has extended to 6.5 million light years, triggered by the NGC 7318B galaxy being rushing towards the center of this galaxy cluster at a high speed. At that time, scientists also discovered that this shock wave had caused the interstellar gas equivalent to 100 billion times the mass of sun to be disturbed by impact, forming a shock wave arc of huge length.
The gas group discovered by "China Sky Eye" this time is even larger. This giant radio telescope located in a valley in Dawotang, Pingtang County, Guizhou Province, my country has a diameter of 500 meters. Its spherical observation area is equivalent to 32 football fields. It has extremely strong sky patrol and observation ability, especially its detection ability for extremely dark and weak celestial bodies is very strong. It is the best in the world. Its super vision can detect the dark and weak radiation of extremely thin diffuse atomic gas far away from the center of the galaxy, so it can discover the huge hydrogen gas group surrounding the Stephen Five Galaxy.
So how does such a huge hydrogen gas mass form? Where did it come from? In fact, the hydrogen in the universe all comes from the beginning of the formation of the universe. It is generally believed that only the big bang when the universe was born can produce the hydrogen element . The galaxy itself is produced in the hydrogen cluster gathered by the hydrogen element. When the four galaxies in the Stephen galaxy cluster gather together, the hydrogen clusters they carry will also aggregate together to form a larger hydrogen cluster. When the galaxy collide with each other, the galaxy and other large-scale celestial bodies approaching faster, and the hydrogen cluster they are located is elongated behind, so the hydrogen cluster in this five-fold galaxy looks very large. What is strange about
is that analysis found that most of the hydrogen in this huge hydrogen group has not been ionized by ultraviolet background radiation. The reason may be that it is far away from the strong radiation source in the galaxy, and the charges of hydrogen groups in different galaxies may be different.
Relatively speaking, astronomers have relatively little observation and research on hydrogen gas groups in the universe. This discovery of China's Sky Eye has opened a new window for studying the origin of celestial bodies in the universe, and shows that there may be more such large-scale low-density atomic gas structures in the universe.
Reference:
"CCTV News" client October 19 article "China's Sky Eye FAST discovers the largest atomic gas structure in the universe"
