{"id":151181,"date":"2025-06-20T08:33:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T08:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/a-vast-filament-of-lost-matter-in-the-universe-has-been-discovered-connecting-four-clusters-of-galaxies\/"},"modified":"2025-06-20T08:33:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T08:33:04","slug":"a-vast-filament-of-lost-matter-in-the-universe-has-been-discovered-connecting-four-clusters-of-galaxies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/a-vast-filament-of-lost-matter-in-the-universe-has-been-discovered-connecting-four-clusters-of-galaxies\/","title":{"rendered":"A vast filament of ‘lost matter’ in the universe has been discovered, connecting four clusters of galaxies."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Actualizado <\/span>

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Astronomers<\/strong> have made a groundbreaking discovery of a massive \u00a0hot gas filament\u00a0 that connects four \u00a0galaxy clusters\u00a0, potentially unveiling some of the universe’s long-sought \u00a0‘missing matter’\u00a0. This revelation helps to address a mystery that has perplexed scientists for decades.<\/p>\n

Utilizing the \u00a0ESA’s XMM-Newton\u00a0 and \u00a0JAXA’s Suzaku\u00a0 space telescopes, the research team identified a filament with a mass ten times greater than that of our \u00a0Milky Way\u00a0 galaxy. Findings from this important work have been published in the journal \u00a0Astronomy and Astrophysics\u00a0.<\/p>\n

It has been estimated that over a third of the \u00a0‘normal matter’\u00a0 in the local universe\u2014this includes the matter we can see, such as stars, planets, and galaxies\u2014has seemingly vanished. Although elusive, this matter is crucial for maintaining accurate models of cosmic structure.<\/p>\n

Models suggest that this missing matter may exist in long \u00a0gas chains\u00a0, or filaments, interlinking the densest regions of space. While astronomers have previously detected filaments, isolating their properties has proven challenging due to their faintness, complicating the extraction of their light from nearby \u00a0black holes\u00a0 and galaxies.<\/p>\n

OBSERVATIONS MATCH THE MODEL<\/h2>\n

This new research is among the first to successfully find and accurately characterize a \u00a0unique hot gas filament\u00a0 extending between four galaxy clusters within the nearby universe. “For the first time, our results closely align with what we observe in our primary \u00a0cosmic model\u00a0, which is something that we hadn’t seen before,” said lead investigator, \u00a0Konstantinos Migkas\u00a0, from the \u00a0Leiden Observatory\u00a0. “It appears that the simulations were correct from the very start.”<\/p>\n

The newly discovered filament, boasting a temperature exceeding \u00a010 million degrees\u00a0, possesses approximately ten times the mass of the \u00a0Milky Way\u00a0 and connects two clusters at one end and two at the other. All of these are part of the \u00a0Shapley Supercluster\u00a0, which consists of over \u00a08,000 galaxies\u00a0, making it one of the most massive structures in the nearby universe.<\/p>\n

This striking filament stretches diagonally away from us through the supercluster, spanning an impressive \u00a023 million light-years\u00a0\u2014the equivalent of traversing the Milky Way from end to end around 230 times.<\/p>\n

Konstantinos and his team characterized the filament by combining \u00a0X-ray observations\u00a0 from both XMM-Newton and Suzaku with thorough analysis of optical data from several other sources. The two X-ray telescopes were a perfect match for this endeavor. Suzaku mapped the faint X-ray light emitted by the filament over a broad area, while XMM-Newton precisely located contaminating X-ray sources\u2014specifically the \u00a0supermassive black holes\u00a0 inhabiting it.<\/p>\n

“Thanks to XMM-Newton, we were able to identify and eliminate these cosmic contaminants, which allowed us to confirm that we were indeed observing the filament’s gas and nothing else,” added co-author \u00a0Florian Pacaud\u00a0 from the \u00a0University of Bonn\u00a0 in Germany. “Our approach proved to be remarkably successful, revealing that the filament appears exactly as we would expect from our best large-scale universe simulations.”<\/p>\n

CONNECTED OVER COLOSSAL DISTANCES<\/h2>\n

Beyond revealing a previously unseen thread of matter traversing the nearby cosmos, this discovery illustrates how some of the most dense and extreme structures in the universe\u2014the \u00a0galaxy clusters\u00a0\u2014are interconnected over vast distances. Additionally, this research sheds light on the very nature of the \u00a0‘cosmic web’\u00a0\u2014the vast and invisible network of filaments that underpins the structure of everything we observe.<\/p>\n

“This research serves as an excellent example of collaboration between telescopes and establishes a new benchmark for detecting light from the faint filaments of the cosmic web,” noted \u00a0Norbert Schartel\u00a0, a scientist from the XMM-Newton project at ESA. More fundamentally, this work strengthens our standard model of the cosmos and validates decades of simulations: it seems the \u00a0‘missing matter’\u00a0 might truly be concealed within hard-to-detect threads woven throughout the universe.<\/p>\n


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General News – 2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actualizado Viernes, 20 junio 2025 – 10:00 Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery of a massive \u00a0hot gas filament\u00a0 that connects four \u00a0galaxy clusters\u00a0, potentially unveiling some of the universe’s long-sought \u00a0‘missing matter’\u00a0. This revelation helps to address a mystery that has perplexed scientists for decades. Utilizing the \u00a0ESA’s XMM-Newton\u00a0 and \u00a0JAXA’s Suzaku\u00a0 space telescopes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36400],"tags":[36718,36717,36716,37326,31913,4180,37325,35406,50,8194,4375,18650],"class_list":["post-151181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","tag-ciencia","tag-ciencia-y-salud","tag-ciencia-y-salud-ciencia","tag-clusters","tag-connecting","tag-discovered","tag-filament","tag-galaxies","tag-lost","tag-matter","tag-universe","tag-vast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}