Massive thread of hot gas found linking galaxies and it's 10 times the mass of the Milky Way
The thread could contain some of the Universe's 'missing' matter, addressing a decades-long mystery
Astronomers have uncovered a colossal, searing-hot filament of gas linking four galaxy clusters in the Shapley Supercluster - a discovery that could finally solve the mystery of the Universe's missing matter.
This giant thread, 10 times the mass of the Milky Way and stretching 23 million light-years, is one of the best confirmations yet that vast, faint filaments connect the Universe's largest structures in a cosmic web.
Over one-third of the 'normal' matter in the local Universe - the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life - is missing. It hasn't yet been seen, but it's needed to make our models of the cosmos work properly, NASA says.
Said models suggest that this elusive matter might exist in long strings of gas, or filaments, bridging the densest pockets of space.
"While we've spotted filaments before, it's tricky to make out their properties," said lead researcher Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
"They're faint, making it difficult to isolate their light from that of any galaxies, black holes, and other objects lying nearby.
"For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos - something that's not happened before. It seems that the simulations were right all along."
Clocking in at over 10 million degrees, the filament contains around 10 times the mass of the Milky Way and connects four galaxy clusters - two on one end, two on the other. All are part of the Shapley Supercluster, a collection of more than 8000 galaxies that forms one of the most massive structures in the nearby Universe.
The filament stretches diagonally away from us through the supercluster for 23 million light-years, the equivalent of traversing the Milky Way end to end around 230 times.
The astronomers used the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and JAXA's Suzaku X-ray space telescopes to make the discovery.
"Thanks to XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing else," co-author Florian Pacaud of the University of Bonn, Germany, added.
"Our approach was really successful, and reveals that the filament is exactly as we'd expect from our best large-scale simulations of the Universe."
As well as unveiling a huge and previously unseen thread of matter running through the nearby cosmos, the finding shows how some of the densest and most extreme structures in the Universe - galaxy clusters - are connected over colossal distances.
It also sheds light on the very nature of the 'cosmic web', the vast, invisible cobweb of filaments that underpins the structure of everything we see around us.
"This research... reinforces our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations," Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist, added.
"It seems that the 'missing' matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the Universe."
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