USATODAY.com – Goodness, that’s a great ball of fire
“It’s amazing, easily the largest of its kind,” says discovery team astrophysicist Mark Henriksen of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Hurtling through space at 1.8 million miles-per-hour, the super-size gas ball measures three million light years across (one light year equals about 5.9 trillion miles.) And it is indeed a great ball of fire, filled with charged gas, or plasma, heated to millions of degrees.
The discovery team, led by Alexis Finoguenov of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics, spotted the object using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, an X-ray telescope in space. They report the find, which is rampaging though a merging cluster of galaxies called Abell 3266, in the June 1 Astrophysical Journal.
Abell 3266 is about 800 million light-years away, and holds thousands of galaxies. Galaxies are islands of stars spread throughout the universe, such as our own Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers in recent years have started piecing together how they combine into larger filament-like clusters throughout the cosmos.
The team believes the colossal ball of fire offers a clue as to how galaxy clusters grow. Very messily, in short. The gas cloud has likely been stripped from a small galaxy being consumed by a larger dumb-bell shaped one within Abell 3266. It actually has a shape like a comet, with a cold tail filled with gas that is pulled away as the ball careens past nearby galaxies. This stripping action tears away the weight of the sun in gas from the cloud every hour, bulking up nearby galaxies. [See article] for more, including an X-ray image.