Alex McColgan
speaker
27,837 appearances
101 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 11 Sep
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 65 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
But there was a catch.
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These observations were from the early universe.
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They traced cooler hydrogen gas billions of years in the past, not hot, diffuse material thought to contain most of the universe's missing baryonic matter today.
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Our models predict it stretched along thin filaments of the cosmic web in the local universe, but here the signal is far fainter and harder to isolate.
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We was stuck in the
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In June 2025, astronomers finally found what they were looking for.
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They were able to isolate and spectroscopically measure the hot, low density gas of an individual cosmic web filament in the local universe.
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Marking a breakthrough moment in our quest to locate the missing baryonic matter.
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A team of European researchers headed by lead author Konstantinos Migas at Leiden University in the Netherlands used Jax's Suzaku X-ray space telescope to map a single filament in faint X-ray emissions over a wide area of space.
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They then used the XMM Newton to pinpoint sources of X-ray contamination.
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In this case, supermassive black holes, which had to be removed from the data in order to map the filament.
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In this image, you can see what they found.
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A filament of the cosmic web connecting four galaxy clusters, two on each end, each one as a white spot surrounded by colour.
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The band of purple stretched between them, resembling a honeycomb, or bone marrow like texture, is the filament of X-ray emitting hot gas.
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Located in the Sharpley supercluster, a supercluster of more than 8,000 galaxies, the filament stretches across a distance of twenty three million light years, which is the equivalent of about two hundred and thirty Milky Ways end to end.
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Its mass comes in at roughly ten times that of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
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And the temperature of the filament's hot gas is a scorching ten million degrees Celsius.
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It reveals in detail for the first time how galaxy clusters are connected over colossal distances, and uncovers the vast cosmic web that underpins the structure of our entire universe, like the very bones of a cosmic skeleton upon which everything else forms.
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And according to the paper's co-author, the filament is exactly what we expected from the best large-scale cosmological simulations of the universe.
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We got it right.
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Showing 1461–1480 of 27,837 · page 74 of 1392
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