What's it like inside a massive galaxy cluster? Scientists used 196 lasers to find out.
By Elizabeth Howell published 1 day ago
Scientists conducted experiments to create conditions replicating the hot gas in gigantic galaxy clusters.
An Earthbound experiment is replicating the extreme heat found in galaxy clusters located in deep space using nearly 200 lasers.
The hope is the experiment series will reveal more about the conditions within giant groups of galaxies. Here, hydrogen gas can burn at roughly the same temperatures as it does the center of our sun, or roughly 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius).
Scientists are unsure how these ultrahot conditions can persist within galaxy clusters because the models physicists have built suggest that the gas should have cooled off during the 13.77-billion years the universe has existed.
So a team is investigating these conditions with the most energetic laser facility in the world: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The conditions are created in a dime-sized environment lasting only a fraction of a second, but are a good start to understand more about the galaxy cluster environment, the team says.
More:
https://www.space.com/huge-galaxy-cluster-200-lasers