Beijing, Oct 20 (EFE) .- The Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), located in the southeastern Chinese province of Guizhou, discovered an atomic cloud 20 times larger than the Milky Way.
The finding, made by an international team led by Chinese astronomers and published Wednesday by the scientific journal Nature, might help researchers better understand the origins of galaxies.
The cloud, made up essentially of hydrogen atoms, measures regarding 2 million light-years across and is the largest ever seen to date.
The discovery was made possible by placing FAST pointing in the direction of a group of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, which has become the subject of one of the first images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, recently put into operation, in recent months. .
“Since its discovery 145 years ago, Stephan’s Quintet has been extensively studied by various ground and space telescopes,” Xu Cong, the lead author of the publication, told the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post.
The team of scientists led by Xu of the National Astronomical Observatories of China wanted to use the sensitivity of FAST to better understand how galaxies interacted with each other when they first came together as a group.
To do this, they looked for hydrogen atoms in the area around Stephan’s Quintet, as these particles emit a unique “signature” that can reveal information regarding events that happened long ago.
“It was a challenging task due to the weak signals from the atoms and the large area observed, but FAST’s well-tuned receiver and giant dish, which is the size of 30 football fields, made it possible,” Xu said.
The researchers were surprised to see a gigantic gaseous structure emerge from the data, itself located unusually far from the center of the quintet of galaxies where hydrogen atoms tend to accumulate and eventually form stars.
“We wonder why it still exists, since the atomic gas with low density should have been destroyed by ultraviolet radiation in the cosmic background, according to current theories,” added the academician. EFE
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