A new NASA satellite will study the Milky Way halo



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HaloSat will study the halo of the hot gas that surrounds the Milky Way. | Credit: NASA

A new CubeSat mission called Halosat, sponsored by NASA and recently deployed by the International Space Station, will study the halo of the Milky Way and help scientists discover more information on the subject. missing from the universe.

The Halo Milky Way is a halo-like region that surrounds the Milky Way. It's helping to contain the majority of the galaxy's mbad but scientists do not yet have enough information about its shape and exact mbad.

When the universe began to expand and cool, normal matter converged planets, stars, and galaxies. The CMB (cosmic microwave background) estimates indicate that the universe consists of 5% normal material protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles, 25% dark matter and about 70% dark energy

. the mbades of all the stars, planets, galaxies etc., they saw that it was half of what it should be according to most cosmologists. Philip Kaaret, Principal Investigator of HaloSat at the University of Iowa (UI), the lead institute of the mission, said, "We should have everything we had today when it was over. universe was 400,000 years old. Where did he go? The answer to this question can help us understand how we went from the state of CMB uniformity to the large-scale structures we see today. "

HaloSat was launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on May 21, 2018. Credits: (NASA / Aubrey Gemignani)

The research team believes that the missing material could be found in the hot gas present in the space between the galaxies or in the galactic halos that surround these galaxies.HaloSat will measure the X-rays that are produced by the electrons of the oxygen molecules of the halo because of its extremely high temperature.

While other X-ray telescopes such as the Neutron star of the NASA Interior Composition Explorer and the Chandra's X-ray observatory badyze independent sources by studying small areas of the sky, but HaloSat will study the whole sky, about 100 square degrees, and help scientists determine if the shape of the halo looks more like a fried egg or a "If you think galactic halo in the model of the If it's fried egg, it will have a different brightness distribution when you look at it directly from Earth than when you look at wider angles, "said Keith Jahoda, who is a HaloSat co-investigator and an astrophysicist at Goddard Space. NASA Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "If it's almost spherical in shape, compared to the size of the galaxy, then we expect it to be more or less the same in all directions."

The determination of the shape of the halo will also help astronomers to know more. about its mbad and find out if the missing mbad of the universe is present in galactic halos or not.

The research team is excited about all the things that HaloSat will discover in a first mission of its kind. "HaloSat has definitely shaped my vision of the future," said Hannah Gulick, an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa and who works at the HaloSat mission. "I hope to be an astrophysicist who builds instruments and then uses the observations of these instruments to make my own discoveries."

Source: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center

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