The universe’s mysteries are just too vast to discover all at once, but astronomers are not giving up and they continue to look up to find more and more information that they can hopefully piece together to unravel them. One of the latest discoveries is a newly spotted filament of gas stretching 23 million light-years across the universe, which for reference, our galaxy, the Milky Way, spans about 100,000 light-years, making it 20 times smaller than the filament.
This filament is not just long, but it is also quite hot, with temperatures calculated at 10 million degrees Celsius, which is how astronomers managed to find it, as its heat signature is hot enough for it to blast out X-rays. As The Debrief put it, “the temperature of the filament is so hot it emits X-rays, allowing telescopes like ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra to detect it over vast distances through space.”
Why this filament is actually the key to figure out the universe
The filament seems to be the key to help solve a major cosmic mystery, as for years, scientists have been trying to figure out where a lot of the universe’s everyday matter like protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. was hiding. Eventually a theory was formulated stating that this missing matter might be hiding out in long filaments between galaxies, and given the discovery of this filament which goes between galaxies, the theory might have been correct.
However, it is important to remember that this 23-million-light-year stretch of gas is the strongest evidence yet that those threads exist and that we will need a lot more evidence before the theory can be considered proven.
The detection of this filament was quite the task, as at first they did not exactly know what they were looking for, and once they “found” it, it took some time to figure out how to detect it. In the end the solution was to team up multiple powerful X-ray telescopes and combine their strengths to spot the delicate X-ray glow given off by this thin, scorching gas. As ScienceDaily explains, “the gas in the filament is so hot and thin that it can only be detected with sensitive X-ray instruments.”
The best part about this discovery may not actually be the discovery itself, but what it says about the universe’s structure. These filaments are part of what scientists call the cosmic web, which they have described as a sort of giant framework made of dark matter and gas that holds galaxies together. We tend to think about galaxies as separate entities that float around in the nothingness that we perceive space to be, but the reality is quite different, and astronomers have posited for a very long time that actually galaxies form clusters and move along these threads, sometimes even crashing into each other.
If the filament can prove that connection between galaxies, it could solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. As The Debrief put it, “the detection of such a large and hot filament is a major step forward in understanding the structure and evolution of the universe.”
This discovery opens the door to even more insights, and with next generation X-ray missions like ESA’s Athena on the horizon, scientists hope to map more of these enormous filaments and uncover how galaxies like ours formed in the first place. As ScienceDaily reports, “the new generation of X-ray telescopes will allow astronomers to study these filaments in unprecedented detail.”
All this will take time and will need to be studied for decades before any theory can be declared as the winner, but with the advances in technology and knowing what we are looking for, the rest should come a long much faster and easier.