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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Hot Gas: Astronomers discover galaxy veil


An international team of astronomer’s joint data from the observatory NASA's Chandra X-ray, space observatory ESA's XMM-Newton and Japan's Suzaku. From these data, scientists have unspecified that our galaxy is surrounded by a halo of hot gas that extends in all directions for hundreds of thousands of light years. In this study, the researchers want to understand why, in the early galaxies gone more than half of ordinary matter, without leaving a trace.


Protons and neutrons are classified as "baryons" - a type of subatomic particles that interact strongly to form the nuclei of atoms. Taken together, the baryons are almost all ordinary matter in our universe.

Astronomers have discovered that galaxies lose more than half of its atoms in comparison with the length of time, when they were formed. This whole matter itself simply could not divide, so where did it go? It is a known and very old question, which is based on the "missing baryons."

Now, a team of astronomers led by Dr. Anjali Gupta may have found the answer, at least for our galaxy. Baryons, says Gupta, did not disappear from the Milky Way. Rather, they have turned to the substance; the total mass is 60 billion times the mass of the sun. These agents are all over the galactic disk - halo of hot gas extending around us for hundreds of thousands of light years, reaching a temperature of millions of degrees, with a low density so that if they were in other galaxies, we could not find them.

We already knew that the Milky Way and other galaxies are in the warm gas with temperatures that reach up to a million ° C (1. 8 million ° F). More recently, scientists have discovered the presence of even more hot gas, but now they have found that these newly discovered "hot spots" are much more massive than the warm gas, which we already knew - with so great mass, which may well contain all the missing baryons.

"A reasonable approach, our findings have opened a huge reservoir of hot gas around the Milky Way," - said co-Smith Mathur from the "Ohio State University (Ohio State University) in Columbus.”It extends for several hundred thousand light-years around the Milky Way, and may extend further into the surrounding group of local galaxies. In any case, its mass is incredibly huge. "

Despite the fact that there are still some gaps to be addressed in the near future, this discovery helps scientists better understand the formation of galaxies, and provides solutions to long-standing problems in astrophysics.

Full review of the study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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