On February 17 , 2016 , Japan set in motion a groundbreaking XTC - irradiation astronomy satellite , Hitomi ( or Astro - H ) , which would have probed gumptious upshot in the cosmos such as supermassive black holes . But a calendar month later , disaster struck when it spin out of ascendance . at last , it was destroy .
The destruction of the $ 273 million Hitomi satellite was a huge going to uranology . But , amazingly , in the calendar month it was in orbit , it actually managed to complete some observations . And , in a unexampled paper publish today inNature , we can see the fruits of those brief project .
Before it die , Hitomi was capable to gather data from the Perseus Cluster at the beginning of March for 2.5 day . Perseus is the brightest nearby cluster to Earth in ecstasy - rays , settle about 240 million light - years away , with more than 1,000 extragalactic nebula . It was able to keep , for the first time , the process of a supermassive black hole stirring spicy gas , at the heart of this wandflower cluster .
The solvent are surprising because they suggest that supermassive black holes can prevent the establishment of star by maintain this hot gas at a eminent temperature , in this lawsuit at about 50 million Kelvins . In turn , this may explain why Galax urceolata clusters imprint fewer hotshot than expected .
Above , a montage of a Chandra X - ray image of Perseus ( background ) and the Hitomi X - ray reading . Hitomi Collaboration / JAXA , NASA , ESA , SRON , CSA
“ It is surprising given that the observed neighborhood looks very disturbed , ” subject field co - author Irina Zhuravleva , a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology ( a joint SLAC - Stanford institute ) and Stanford University , tell IFLScience . “ Hitomi ’s notice confirmed the presence of such motions which heat up the gun and quench whizz formation . ”
Galaxy clustering are abundant in gas , so it was opine they should have relatively eminent rates of star formation , but that is not always the lawsuit . Despite this stirring gist , the speed of movement of the gas was quite small at about 160 kilometers ( 100 miles ) per second , much slower than thought .
The result of this observation are 30 times better than anything previous , include NASA ’s Chandra X - ray lookout . But sadly , with the loss of Hitomi , it will likely not be until the final stage of the 2020s with the European Athena X - irradiation Observatory that we get data that can match it .
