Just before meeting its end, Japan's Hitomi satellite sent a farewell gift to Earth. According to the researchers, the doomed satellite made some observations just before its demise that could potentially change the human understanding of galaxy formation.
Japan's Hitomi satellite suffered a "mission ending spacecraft anomaly" in March before the scientists lost all contacts with the satellite. However, the team was able to recover and obtain data on Perseus cluster of galaxies before the satellite met its demise.
Hitomi carried an instrument called the Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS) that allowed researchers to study the movement of gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster. However, the contact with the satellite was lost soon.
The original intention of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission was to study how black holes interact with space-time and to study the formation of galaxies.
According to Brian McNamara of the University of Waterloo, the data recovered from the satellite just before losing all contact was "exquisite." Although the research team is happy about the kind of information that they were able to fetch, they are also a little disappointed about what they did not get or the information that they might have had.
With the help of the data, the scientists were able to figure out that the movement of gas between galaxies in the Perseus cluster was much less turbulent than they had imagined previously. The data retrieved by SXS is so precise that the scientists can now estimate the mass of the galaxies far, far away than their own Milky Way galaxy.
Study co-author Irina Zhuravleva believes that even though Hitomi mission ended tragically and the contact was lost, it is fine to say that the mission has opened a new chapter in the field of X-ray astronomy.
