Global warming is not the only temperature increase we need to worry about -- a new study suggests. Due to natural activity in the galaxy, it seems that the entire universe is getting hotter.
A recent paper found in the Astrophysical Journal describes the universe's thermal history over billions of years. The average gas temperature across the universe has increased over 10 times in the last 10 billion years, wrote the researchers. Currently, the temperature of gases closer to the Earth is approximately four million degrees Fahrenheit.
Yi-Kuan Chaing from Ohio State University shared that their work confirms Jim Peeble's research, who won the 2019 Nobel Laureate in Physics. Peeble's theoretical work and calculations were focused on factors of how the universe formed as well as new physical processes such as cosmic background radiation. His results showed that only 5% of the universe's contents are known to matter while the rest is unknown dark matter and dark energy.
Hot Gases in the Universe
The universe is composed of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that have been formed by dark matter and gas collapsing together due to gravity. On a smaller scale, it's what happens when the gravitational pull of two stars collide and cause black holes, affecting the movement of nearby cosmic bodies. On a large scale, astrophysics has been working to prove that the center of all galaxies, including the Milky Way, is a supermassive black hole influencing the movement of everything within the galaxy.
Gravity pulls dark matter, gas, and galaxies together in space as the universe evolves, explained Chiang. The drag is "so violent that more and more gas is shocked and heated up." This also results in the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect or a change in brightness of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation near galaxy clusters or areas of hot gas.
To analyze the temperature of the universe, the team looked at eight sky intensity maps from the Planck and Infrared Astronomical Satellite missions as well as two million spectroscopic redshift references in the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys. Redshift refers to how light shifts as space objects move closer or farther from Earth, enabling scientists to measure how the universe has expanded.
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Warming Universe and Global Warming Are Unrelated
The redshift effect typically refers to objects far away that causes a longer light wavelength. Objects farther away from Earth also mean that the light is older compared to near-Earth objects. This was also how the team confirmed Jim Peeble's theories about the temperatures of the early universe.
The maps and images from the missions revealed the distances of hot gases in the universe. The gravitational collapse of cosmic structure means that the universe has gotten hotter in the past billions of years and will most likely continue.
The warming of the universe explained Chiang due to natural galaxy processes and structure formation. This is also entirely unrelated to climate change on earth. "These phenomena are happening on very different scales [and]...are not at all connected," he clarified.
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