The average temperature of aerospace gas has risen more than 10 times over the past 10 billion years, now reaching around 2 million degrees Celsius.
Experts from Ohio State University, Kavli Aerospace Physics and Mathematics Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics say the universe is warming, Science Daily reported November 10. The new study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.
“Our new measurements confirm the work of Jim Peebles, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, who presented the hypothesis of the formation of large-scale structures in the universe,” said Yi-Kuan. Chiang, the study’s lead author and expert at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Ohio State University, said.
Large-scale structures in the universe are galactic structures and clusters of galaxies on a larger scale than a single galaxy. They are formed by the gravitational collapse of dark matter and gas. “As the universe evolved, gravity pulled dark matter and space gas into galaxies and clusters. This trail was so intense that more and more of the gases were shocked and heated,” Chiang explained. . prefer.
The team used a new method that allowed them to estimate the temperature of a cosmic gas farther from Earth, that is, older, and compare it with gas closer to Earth. “younger”. Thus, scientists confirm that the universe is heating up due to the gravitational collapse of cosmic structures. This situation may continue in the future.
To find out how the cosmic temperature changes over time, the team used light data collected by the Planck Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Observatory. They synthesized data from these two sources and then estimated the distance between hot gases near and far from Earth due to the redshift phenomenon.
The light that humans see from objects far from Earth is older than the light we see from objects close to Earth. The reason is that light from distant objects has to travel longer distances to reach the human world. Based on this information and the method of estimating the temperature of light, the team measured the average temperature of the gas in the early universe, that is, the flow of gas around distant objects, and compared it to heat. average gas flow near Earth. As a result, space gases today reach a temperature of around 2 million degrees Celsius, more than 10 times the average gas temperature around 10 billion years ago.
The universe is warming up due to the natural formation of galaxies and other structures unrelated to global warming, Chiang said. “These phenomena occur on very different scales. They are completely independent,” he said.
