There is a mysterious cosmic network of radio wave filaments

There is a mysterious cosmic network of unknown origin , made up of very long and thin filaments of radio waves that cross the Abell 2255 galaxy cluster, 800 million light years from Earth . It was discovered thanks to the international study led by Italy with the National Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Bologna, which has allowed us to observe in unprecedented detail all the main galaxies that make up the cluster . The result , which is being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is due to the European Lofar radio telescope , the largest network in the world currently operational for observations in very low frequency radio waves , with over 25 thousand antennas grouped in 51 stations spread across Europe .

"We calibrated 56 hours of observations , divided into night sessions of about 8 hours each ," comments Emanuele De Rubeis of INAF and the University of Bologna, first author of the study. "The raw data from each night weighs about 4 terabytes (1 terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes), but after calibration their volume increases to 18–20 terabytes, for a total of about 140 terabytes overall." An enormous amount of data, therefore, that required numerous attempts: "To completely process a single night and produce the images of all the sources - continues De Rubeis - we spent about a month on average."

The observations have allowed us to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the galaxies in the Abell 2255 cluster , from their early stages until their extinction, and have revealed extremely elongated filamentary structures that extend for distances between 260,000 and 360,000 light years, or 3 or 4 times the diameter of the Milky Way . According to the researchers, these filaments could originate inside the galaxies, and then be dragged away by turbulent motions.