Huge Fire Ball Falling Into Abell 3266

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Every day, new data comes flowing in and astronomers do a double take and they try to keep their heads above water as the tide rises. Everywhere they look, nothing is exactly as expected, often totally different and utterly unexplainable. Time for invisible 'dark matter'---the new 'ether'!

Mysterious giant fireball is falling towards equally mysterious global cluster group, Abell 3266.

12 June 2006
Thanks to data from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, a team of international scientists found a comet-like ball of gas over a thousand million times the mass of the sun hurling through a distant galaxy cluster over 750 kilometres per second.

This colossal 'ball of fire' is by far the largest object of this kind ever identified.
The gas ball is about three million light years across, or about five thousand million times the size of our solar system. It appears from our perspective as a circular X-ray glow with a comet-like tail nearly half the size of the moon.

"The size and velocity of this gas ball is truly fantastic," said Dr Alexis Finoguenov, adjunct assistant professor of physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and an associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. "This is likely a massive building block being delivered to one of the largest assembly of galaxies we know."

The gas ball is in a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266, millions of light years from Earth, thus posing absolutely no danger to our solar system. Abell 3266 contains hundreds of galaxies and great amounts of hot gas that is nearly a hundred million degrees. Both the cluster gas and the giant gas ball are held together by the gravitational attraction of unseen dark matter.

If the universe is moving away from each other odd amounts of gas wouldn't be rapidly moving towards other objects. There are a million questions surrounding this hot gas. How did it become hot in the first place? Why is it moving towards something else instead of rapidly flying off into the wild blue yonder? Where did it originate? If it was a huge star that blew up, why is it alone? So far, all the stars we see are parts of galaxies. We don't even know why mini galaxies form and why they float around for some time until they fall helplessly into the nearest galactic pool.

Just one day after posting my usual story based on immediate observational events, along comes yet another one putting yet another nail in the 'universe is flying apart' model. I now see increasingly, astronomers refering to 'dark matter' to explain away the increasingly obvious truth that the universe isn't flying apart but is doing something very different.

Like folding into itself.

Back to this amazing hot gas: in the last 15 years, astronomers using other wave lengths have noticed the universe is quite different when we can see many levels of energy. Namely, it is much more complex as well as extensive. Connections between galaxies that were totally hidden from view leap out and show increasingly that many galaxies aren't merely near each other, they share common energy envelopes. Some of these envelopes are extremely hot which means something very powerful is at work. As I keep pointing out, trying to explain away every observation that pours in is causing more and more distress to astronomers. This is also a very exciting time to be in that field. The coming battle to explain the manifold and multitudenous contridictions will be interesting, a budding Einstein somewhere will take all this mess and refit it into a new theory. One might dare call it the Unified Theory, heh (joking...maybe!)

Here is a recent paper about Abell 3266

We present results from a BeppoSAX observation of the rich cluster Abell 3266. The broadband spectrum (2-50 keV) of the cluster, when fitted with an optically thin thermal emission model, yields a temperature of 8.1+/-0.2 keV and a metal abundance of 0.17+/-0.02 in solar units, with no evidence of a hard X-ray excess in the Phoswich Detector System spectrum. By performing a spatially resolved spectral analysis, we find that the projected temperature drops with increasing radius, going from ~10 keV at the cluster core to ~5 keV at about 1.5 Mpc. Our BeppoSAX temperature profile is in good agreement with the ASCA temperature profile of Markevitch et al. From our two-dimensional temperature map, we find that the gradient is observed in all azimuthal directions. The temperature gradient may have been caused by a recent merger event that was also responsible for a velocity-dispersion gradient measured in the optical band. The projected metal abundance profile and the two-dimensional map are both consistent with being constant.

I like the 'temperature gradient (of the gas cloud) may have been caused by a recent merger event...! Isn't it funny how everywhere we train our observations, we see such things? If I were observing a highway and instead of seeing the cars drive off into the distance, instead, saw accidents in every direction including fireballs, I would think maybe the cars aren't driving off into the distance, right?

This is from last summer.

Waterloo ON (SPX) Aug 31, 2005
A comprehensive survey of more than 4,000 elliptical and lenticular galaxies in 93 nearby galaxy clusters has found a curious case of galactic "downsizing."

Contrary to expectations, the largest, brightest galaxies in the census consist almost exclusively of very old stars, with much of their stellar populations having formed as long ago as 13 billion years.

There appears to be very little recent star formation in these galaxies, nor is there strong evidence for recent ingestion of smaller, younger galaxies.

By contrast, the smaller, fainter galaxies studied by the NOAO Fundamental Plane Survey are significantly younger -- their stars were formed as little as four billion years ago, according to new results from the survey team to be published in the September 10, 2005, Astrophysical Journal.

The evolutionary history of elliptical galaxies and lenticular galaxies (which have a central bulge and a disk, but no evidence of spiral arms) is not well understood.

Not well understood? Understatement of the century. We really can't know anything unless we gather more data. We are in a very rich period in astronomy. Like the shattering effects of the invention of the telescope utterly transforming astronomy so it is today with the many multi-mirror arrays, radar, ultraviolet, infrared, space and terrestrial observatories, our eyes are literally being opened in a most forceful way.

My grandfather and his cohorts, when working with Lowell on Mars studies, tried to pin down those canals everyone assumed were there. There were none! Was this a waste?

Aside from inspiring a host of fun Martian sciensefiction stories and movies, that is.

If they ignored the heavens, there would have never been a push to learn more, to build better observatories, to launch orbital observatories. The race to explain all these mysteries is what pushes science forwards. But every once and a while, the flood of information begins to show many discordances, many paradoxes. Then there is a crisis as things look odder and odder and the puzzle pieces no longer fit. We are rapidly approaching exactly such a time.

I am really looking forwards to what happens next.

It is sad that Hawkings is no longer able to easily communicate or rummage through the incoming data.

BBC: Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter are to write a science book for children which will be "a bit like Harry Potter", but without the magic.

They aim to explain theoretical physics in an accessible way to youngsters.

Professor Hawking became famous for his bestseller A Brief History of Time, which attempted to simplify cosmology, the Big Bang and black holes.

He communicates through his family through blinking his eyes. And that is exhausting him. What I liked about him, years ago, was his willingness to think of all sorts of things outside of the box. He did this with the slenderest of information. It is only the last three years we have truly begun to see dimly, what is going on in the deep past or the other side of the cosmos. And every view we get astonishes us endlessly and fits no previous matrix created so craftily by previous studies.

But every generation has its geniuses and I believe there are plenty of candidates for this and someone will be the next great astronomical architect.

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Comments

[JSmith]

In your post about meteorites

http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/space_news/2006/06/more_meteorites.html

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