Largest gas cloud in the universe found

A Japanese research team found what is believed to be the largest gas cloud in the early universe 11.5 billion years ago, with a diameter of 160 million light years.

A galaxy supercluster in this infrared image from NASA. Photo: NASA.

Japanese astronomers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii discovered a giant cloud of hydrogen gas that stretched 160 million light-years across 11.5 billion years ago, according to IFL Science. It was large enough to fit 1,600 Milky Way galaxies.

The region of space chosen for the study is the presence of the SSA22 supercluster of galaxies. The researchers used light from galaxies in SSA22 to study the faint gas clouds, but they did not anticipate how widespread the gas clouds are inside, around, and outside the cluster. The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"We were surprised to see a much more extensive structure of dense gas in the supercluster than expected," said Dr Ken Mawatari of Osaka Sangyo University. "We need more observations over a larger area to get a full picture of the largest structure in the young universe."

The standard cosmological model suggests that structures in the early universe were typically smaller in size, then merged into larger structures over time. The team also concluded that the gas distribution was not uniform with the way galaxies were spread out within superclusters. The findings reveal a new relationship between gas clouds and galaxy clusters in the early universe.

According to VNE