Doomed Japanese satellite glimpsed galactic wind before it died

It’s a taste of what might have been. In March, a software glitch caused the Japanese X-ray satellite Hitomi to spin itself to pieces just a month and a half after launch. Efforts to rescue it have since been abandoned. But before it died, the probe mapped of one of the largest weather systems in the universe, the flowing plasma of a massive clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster. We have long known that superheated plasma fills the spaces between galaxies in a cluster. This swirling material outweighs stars and other normal matter – that is, not dark matter made from exotic, unknown particles – by a factor of about five, making it a key part of the universe. But it is difficult to detect except in the X-ray wavelengths Hitomi was sensitive to, where it gives off a faint glow. More

(Source: New Scientist - Jul 7)