Masaryk: The First Galaxies Were Even More Violent Than Expected

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Masaryk: The First Galaxies Were Even More Violent Than Expected

Post by bystander » Wed Jun 28, 2017 3:11 pm

The First Galaxies Were Even More Violent Than Expected
Masaryk University, Czech Republic | EWASS 2017 | 2017 Jun 28
[img3="M82, a nearby galaxy showing strong galactic winds. The early universe must have contained many more galaxies like this, or with even stronger activity. X-ray data (Chandra) appears in blue; infrared light (Spitzer) appears in red; visual data (Hubble) appears in orange (Hα) and yellow-green.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/UofA/ESA/AURA/JHU
"]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... pitzer.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
An international team of researchers has shown that the hot diffuse gas that fills the space between the galaxies has the same concentration of iron in all galaxy clusters that were studied in sufficient detail by the Japanese Suzaku satellite. It seems that most of the iron inside the intergalactic gas arose long before the first clusters of galaxies were formed. ...

The team studied the hot gas permeating ten nearby clusters of galaxies and showed that the concentration of chemical elements is about the same in all of them -- a third of that observed in our Sun.

These results confirm earlier indications, which suggested that most of the iron in the universe was produced and spread throughout intergalactic space before galaxy clusters formed, more than 10 billion years ago. The iron, and many other elements, was blown out of galaxies by the combined energy of billions of supernovae, as well as outbursts from growing supermassive black holes.

Only hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of lithium were produced during the big bang. Most of the elements that we are made of were forged inside stars and released by stellar explosions called supernovae. How well are the elements spread through the intergalactic space has long been an open question. ...

A Uniform Metallicity in the Outskirts of Massive, Nearby Galaxy Clusters - O. Urban et al
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