Science

Mystery in Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation could be Coma cloud w/ black holes

by William Atkins

Monday, 23 April 2007

U.S. scientists think that the source of mysterious cosmic rays could be from a plasma cloud located about 300 million light-years away near the Coma Cluster, which contains several galaxies with supermassive black holes.

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The Coma Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies that contains more than one thousand identified galaxies. Its mean distance from the Earth is about 321 million light-years (LTs, where one light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Earth-year, with the speed of light being about 186,000 miles in one second).

Lead by Los Alamos National Labs (New Mexico) scientist Philipp P. Kronberg, the scientists (which included R. Kothes, C.J. Salter, and P. Perillat) used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia, Canada.

Their results (“Discovery of New Faint Radio Emission on 8° to 3 Scales in the Coma field, and Some Galactic and Extragalactic Implications”) appear in the April 10, 2007 issue of Astrophysics Journal. The researcher’s abstract of the paper can be read online at: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ucp/WebIntegrationServlet?call=ContentWeblet&url=http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJ/v659n1/64492/64492.html?erFrom=4291506212605310290Guest&current_page=content

Galaxies (they’re called active galaxies) with supermassive black holes at their centers are called active galactic nuclei (AGN). An AGN is a very small volume within the central part of a galaxy that has a much higher than normal luminosity (brightness) over all, or at least most, of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum (which includes the radio, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma ray types of radiation). The massive amounts of radiation—often considered the most luminous sources of EM radiation in the universe—coming from these AGNs are believed to come about because of a supermassive black hole at the center of the host active galaxy.

This plasma, cloud, which is believed to be about six million light-years in diameter, could explain how AGNs convert and transfer their enormous gravitational forces into magnetic fields and cosmic rays—a process that is still unknown by Earth scientists.

Scientists are unsure what causes mysterious noise within cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), which is thought to be left-over radiation from the Big Bang, the event that is thought to have created our universe. CMBR, discovered in 1965, is considered to be very good evidence for validating the Hot Big Bang theory of the universe.

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