An enormous cloud of roiling plasma in space may be drawing its energy from black holes, new observations suggest. Such clouds might be sources for the mysterious particles that occasionally crash into Earth's atmosphere at ultra-high speed.
Plasma is a form of matter in which electrons have been ripped from their atomic nuclei, leaving behind a cloud of charged particles. Astronomers can detect plasma as a result of the radio waves emitted by free electrons when they interact with magnetic fields in their environment.
But most radio observations focus on small patches of sky, so they cannot detect very large structures. The newly discovered plasma cloud was discovered in a survey designed to overcome that problem.
The researchers discovered a cloud of plasma about 8 million light years across, or 80 times the width of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is so huge that it appears five times as large as the Full Moon, even though it is millions of light years away.
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