Before failing, Japan’s Hitomi satellite returned data on galactic wind
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029948
New Scientist : In March, just over a month after it launched, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hitomi x-ray telescope suffered a failure that rendered it inoperable. Now the satellite team has released a paper showing that Hitomi was able to collect useful information before it died. Andrew Fabian of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues used Hitomi data to map the flow of plasma away from the Perseus cluster of galaxies and out into intergalactic space. Hitomi‘s images reveal that the flow is massive, with gusts of plasma larger than the Milky Way. The galactic wind is driven by a supermassive black hole located at the center of the cluster’s central galaxy. The black hole creates jets of particles that travel near the speed of light and blow cooler gas out of the cluster.
