Far out cosmology: Shock waves rattle the cosmic wave (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 08, 2023, 15:44 (415 days ago) @ David Turell

Much more than gravitational waves:

https://www.livescience.com/galaxy-size-shock-waves-found-rattling-the-cosmic-web-the-l...

"Astronomers have detected enormous shockwaves rattling the cosmic web that connects all galaxies in the universe, offering vital clues on how the largest structures in space were shaped.

"For the first time, astronomers have spotted enormous, galaxy-scale shock waves rattling the "cosmic web" that connects nearly all known galaxies. These cosmic waves could reveal clues about how the largest objects in the universe were sculpted.

"The discovery was made by stitching and stacking thousands of radio telescope images together, which revealed the soft "radio glow" produced by shock waves from colliding matter in our universe's biggest structures.

"The cosmic web is a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways paved with hydrogen gas and dark matter. Galaxies tend to form where multiple strands of the web intersect, often in clusters numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Now a new study, published Feb. 15 in the journal Science(opens in new tab), could provide vital clues into the nature of the mysterious magnetic fields that stretch beside these tendrils.

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"'Magnetic fields pervade the universe — from planets and stars to the largest spaces in-between galaxies," lead author Tessa Vernstrom, an astronomer at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Crawley, Australia, said in a statement. "However, many aspects of cosmic magnetism are not yet fully understood, especially at the scales seen in the cosmic web."

"Taking shape in the chaotic aftermath of the Big Bang, the cosmic web's tendrils formed as clumps of matter from the roiling particle-antiparticle broth of the young universe — whose rapid expansion pushed the filaments outwards to form an interconnected soap-sud structure of thin films surrounding countless, mostly empty voids.

"Far from being completely frozen in place, the cosmic web's matter can sometimes violently collide. When matter in the web merges, enormous shock waves send charged particles ricocheting through the web's magnetic fields, causing the particles to emit a faint radio wave glow. These shock waves have been spotted around some of the universe's largest galaxy clusters, but until now they were never observed around the web itself.

"'These shock waves give off radio emissions which should result in the cosmic web 'glowing' in the radio spectrum, but it had never really been conclusively detected due to how faint the signals are," Vernstrom said.

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"Now that the shock waves' existence has been confirmed, they could be used to probe the nature of the enormous magnetic fields that suffuse the web, which play an unknown role in shaping the universe."

Comment: our planetary orbits might be relatively fixed, but our solar system is travelling along as is everything else in the universe. Collisions are widespread.