6.5 million light-years of “explosion” caused by galaxy collisions!

The South African Meerkat Radio Telescope is the forerunner of the telescope Square kilometer line (SKA), a giant radio telescope project with multiple interferometric networks in metric and centimetric wavelengths and having a collecting surface area equivalent to one square kilometer. It has made it possible to study the shock wave resulting from the collision of galaxies over 6.5 million light-years away.

As a part of Fixed cosmological modelThe Gravity Mentioned Black material Caused by her Decline At the very beginning of the history of the observable universe, with the collapse of ordinary matter leading to galaxies. These, in turn, and always follow the concentration Black materialWill collect in the fibers and inside Constellations Contains hundreds or thousands of galaxies.

The observable universe certainly expands, but, like the level The Solar System Or some Stars In a galaxy, this expansion is sometimes blocked by the gravitational pull of the object.Dark energy. It is for this reason that The Andromeda galaxy Eventually colliding Milky Way And for example we notice Hubble Colliding is not just about stars Titanic collisions of galaxies.

Shock waves that indirectly radiate electrons

A few years ago, a new network of radio telescopes was launched in South Africa. This Mirgate And it consisted of 64 parabolas Radio The individual is 13.5 m in diameter and spreads over an area of ​​8 km. Today, a team of radio astronomers using data from this instrument reveals that they provide very detailed images of the shock wave, which is comparable to an explosion caused by a collision with an interlectric medium. Merging Two galaxies and a cluster known as Abel 3667 formed about a billion years ago.

The bunch is mentioned in the list of stars of the same type whose constitution was initiatedAstronomer The first edition was published in 1958 by the American George Acton Abel. Now there are more than 4,000 in it.

From the images in the radio field, it is clear that the creation of the Abel 3667 was accompanied by a supersonic boom in the intercalactic medium and hot plasma bathing the clusters. The main system observed is approximately 6.5 millionLight years. Remember that the visible disk of our Milky Way galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. One can measure the magnitude of the shock wave by looking at a portion of its X-ray image Photography From synthetic to false above Colors. Details of the researchers’ findings on Abell 3667 are presented in a paper arXiv.

Francesco de Casparin (University of Hamburg and INAF), Editor-in-Chief of the article, explains in a report about the structures revealed by the Mirgate images. South African Radio Astronomy Laboratory (SARAO) They ” It was full of surprises and more complicated than we initially thought. The Shock waves act like giant particle accelerators It speeds up Electrons At close speed The speed of light. As these fast electrons pass through a magnetic field, they emit the radio waves we see. “.