Mysterious “Lonely Cloud” Bigger Than Milky Way Found in a Galaxy “No-Man’s Land”

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Orphan Cloud Discovered in Galaxy Cluster

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The orphan cloud is the blue umbrella-shaped part of this image, which is color-coded to reveal the X-ray part of the cloud in blue, the warm gas in red, and the noticeable area in white. Credit: Ge et al (2021)

A clinically mystical, separated cloud larger than the Milky Way has actually been discovered by a research study group at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in a “no-man’s land” for galaxies.

The so-called orphan or lonesome cloud has lots of hot gas with temperature levels of 10,000-10,000,000 degrees Kelvin (K) and an overall mass 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That makes it bigger than the mass of little galaxies.

The cloud was found in Abell 1367 by a group led by Dr. Ming Sun, an associate teacher of physics at UAH, which belongs of the University of Alabama System. Also called the Leo Cluster, A1367 consists of around 70 galaxies and lies around 300 million light-years from Earth.

The term paper was led by Dr. Ming’s UAH postdoctoral scientist, Dr. Chong Ge, and the 2nd author is likewise his postdoctoral scientist, Dr. Rongxin Luo. Dr. Sun is 3rd author and the matching author. Also consisted of on the paper is Tim Edge (MS, physics, 2019), who now operates at Dynetics Inc.

The cloud was discovered utilizing the European Space Agency (ESA) X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton), Europe’s flagship X-ray telescope. The cloud was likewise observed with the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope/Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (VLT/MUSE) and Japan’s flagship optical telescope, Subaru.

“This is an exciting and also a surprising discovery. It demonstrates that new surprises are always out there in astronomy, as the oldest of the natural sciences.” Dr. Sun states. “Apparently, ESA agrees as our discovery was selected as an ESA image release, which has been very selective.”

XMM took the X-ray picture of the cloud and the optical images were taken by VLT/MUSE and Subaru. Except for the Subaru images, Dr. Sun is the primary private investigator for the XMM and VLT/MUSE information.

“The cloud was serendipitously discovered in our XMM data,” states Dr. Sun. “The optical data come from our VLT/MUSE data and confirm the cloud is located in the cluster.”

The cloud was found in a cluster of galaxies where countless galaxies are bound together with rare hot gas with temperature levels of about 100,000,000 K existing in between them, states Dr. Sun.

“However, the cloud is not associated with any galaxy and is in a ‘no-galaxy’s land,’” he states, including that the cloud more than likely stemmed from a big, unidentified galaxy in the cluster.

“The gas in the cloud is removed by ram pressure of the hot gas in the cluster, when the host galaxy is soaring in the hot gas with a velocity of 1,000-2,000 kilometers per second.”

That’s about 50 times faster than the orbital speed of Earth around the sun. That level of force at work can rip the interstellar medium out of a galaxy, and in this case the scientists discovered that the temperature level of the cloud follows having actually stemmed from a galaxy.

“It is like when your hairs and clothes are flying backward when you are running forward against a strong headwind,” Dr. Sun states. “Once removed from the host galaxy, the cloud is initially cold and is evaporating in the host intracluster medium, like ice melting in the summer.”

Yet it is approximated that this enormous, mystical cloud has actually made it through for numerous countless years after elimination from its host galaxy.

“This surprising longevity is poorly understood but may have something to do with the magnetic field in the cloud,” Dr. Sun states.

The field might act to hold the cloud together by reducing unsteady forces that would otherwise trigger it to dissipate, the researchers believe.

With future research study, Dr, Ming states that the lonesome cloud and others that are yet to be found might assist researchers much better comprehend removed interstellar mediums at country miles from their galaxies, along with the impacts of turbulence and heat conduction.

“As the first isolated cloud glowing in both the H-alpha spectral line and X-rays in a cluster of galaxies, it shows that the gas removed from galaxies can create clumps in the intracluster medium, and these clumps can be discovered with wide-field optical survey data in the future.”

Reference: ” An H α/X-ray orphan cloud as a signpost of intracluster medium clumping” by Chong Ge, Rongxin Luo, Ming Sun, Masafumi Yagi, Pavel Jáchym, Alessandro Boselli, Matteo Fossati, Paul E J Nulsen, Craig Sarazin, Tim Edge, Giuseppe Gavazzi, Massimo Gaspari, Jin Koda, Yutaka Komiyama and Michitoshi Yoshida, 1 June 2021, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab1569