“Violent Drag of Dark Matter” – It is turning on the thermostat of the universe



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New Hubble Deep Field image

“As the universe evolves, gravity pulls dark matter and gas into space together into galaxies and galaxy clusters,” said Yi-Kuan Chiang, a researcher at the Ohio State University Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics. . “The resistance is violent, so violent that more and more gasoline is shocked and heated.”

Thermal history of the universe

“Our new measurement provides direct confirmation of the fundamental work of Jim Peebles, the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in physics, who exposed the theory of how large-scale structure is formed in the universe,” Chiang said of a new study that probed the thermal history of the universe over the past 10 billion years, finding that the average gas temperature in the universe increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees Kelvin today, approximately 4 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Peebles, science professor Albert Einstein, emeritus at Princeton University, faced the cosmos, with its billions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Its theoretical framework, developed over two decades, is the foundation of our modern understanding of the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present day, ”said the Nobel Prize Academy.

The large-scale structure of the universe, Chiang says, consists of global models of galaxies and clusters of galaxies at scales beyond individual galaxies, formed by the gravitational collapse of dark matter and gas.

Cosmic temperature control

The results, Chiang said, showed scientists how to measure the progress of the formation of the cosmic structure by “controlling the temperature” of the universe, using a new method that allowed them to estimate the temperature of the gas farthest from Earth, which it means further back time, and compare them to the gases closest to Earth and closest to present time. Now, he said, the researchers have confirmed that the universe is overheating over time due to the gravitational collapse of the cosmic structure and warming will likely continue.

“Data on Light & Redshift”

To understand how the temperature of the universe has changed over time, researchers at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics report using data on light in space collected by two missions, Planck and Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Planck, the European Space Agency mission operating with strong NASA involvement, makes the most accurate measurements to date of tiny variations in the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background, created more than 13 billion years ago does; Sloan collects detailed images and light spectra from the universe, as well as creating the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe ever made, with deep multicolored images of a third of the sky and spectra for over three million astronomical objects.

The Ohio State team combined data from the two missions and evaluated the distances of the near and distant hot gases by measuring the redshift, which works because the light we see from objects farther from Earth is older than what we see. we see from objects closest to Earth — Light from distant objects has traveled a longer journey to reach us. This fact, together with a method for estimating the temperature from light, allowed the researchers to measure the average temperature of gases in the early universe, the gases surrounding the most distant objects, and to compare that average with the average temperature of gases. closer to Earth: gases today.

Those gases in today’s universe, the researchers found, reach temperatures of around 2 million degrees Kelvin, around 4 million degrees Fahrenheit, around objects closest to Earth. This is about 10 times the temperature of the gases around the farthest and furthest objects back in time.

The universe, Chiang said, is warming due to the natural process of galaxy formation and structure. It is not related to the current global warming on Earth. “These phenomena are happening on very different scales,” he said. “They are not connected at all.”

Source: Yi-Kuan Chiang et al, The Cosmic Thermal History

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Ohio State University

Image credit: In the new version of the Hubble deep field image, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias took nearly three years to produce by recovering a large amount of light ‘lost’ around the largest galaxies in the iconic Hubble Ultra -Deep Field.



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