Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen, on 13 July 2022, at 08:39 am Los Angeles time

A filament bridge connecting the galaxy clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401 has been subjected to intense observations that have resulted in the finding of an extremely hot intergalactic environment.

The filament that connects the two galaxies is over 40 million light-years and has a mass equivalent to the 50 billionth mass of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Astronomers are still doing research and studying the recent discovery that was only possible with the help of archival data from the Planck satellite and the high-performance Atacama Cosmological Telescope (ACT) in northern Chile, which is able to analyze in detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe.

However, it is not surprising that astronomers have begun to discover masses of gas in our universe, because the galaxies that emit the most light contain only 10% of the atoms in the universe, the remaining 90% remain outside the galaxy, in the network cosmic, some of them grouped in various forms, such as this one.

Observing the gas is difficult due to its thinness. This is known as the "missing baryon problem".

In the past, such discoveries occurred once every many years, very rarely, but due to new high-performance telescopes, in recent years astronomers have had the opportunity to observe several such filaments.

Martine Lokken, Ph.D. A student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, he used data from the Dark Energy Survey to identify nearly 1,000 clusters of galaxies that are subject to penetration by such filaments.

She added this data to the new data from Planck and ACT, thus discovering that gas and filamentary patterns have expanded very far beyond clusters.