Scientists have found a vast tsunami wave of hot gas in the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster.
The wave is about twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, spanning some 200,000 light-years.
The researchers say the giant wave formed billions of years ago, after a small galaxy cluster grazed Perseus and caused its vast supply of gas to slosh around an enormous volume of space.
These waves are giant versions of Kelvin-Helmholtz intabilities, which show up wherever there’s a velocity difference across the interface of two fluids, such as in cloud formations on Earth, for example.
The Perseus galaxy cluster is some 11 million light-years across and located about 240 million light-years away. Most of its observable matter takes the form of a pervasive gas averaging tens of millions of degrees, so hot it only glows in X-rays.
