Ill-Fated Japanese Satellite Captured Images of Galactic Wind Before Dying

In March, Japan’s space agency launched the Hitomi – what should have been a groundbreaking X-ray satellite – with high hopes only to have them dashed. Just over a month into the mission, a software glitch snowballed into a full-blown catastrophe that propelled the space telescope into a death spiral, spinning off debris and solar panels until it disintegrated.

Before it met its untimely demise, the Hitomi heroically relayed images of one of the largest weather systems in the universe, allowing scientists to salvage at least one valuable observational data set from the doomed spacecraft.

The Hitomi mapped the X-ray emissions coming from a massive clutch of galaxies, dubbed the Perseus cluster, 250 million light years away, using the readings to measure the speed of the intergalactic gases swirling within it. The observations yielded some unexpected insights: the galactic wind is moving at a speed of approximately 102 miles per second, which is more sluggish than scientists had predicted, given that the galaxies within the cluster themselves are moving thousands of miles per second.

The gases are superheated plasmas that normally occur in the gaps between galaxies. They come from a supermassive black hole that lies at the dark heart of the Perseus cluster, which spews jets of plasma particles at close to the speed of light.

The Hitomi’s observations should give us a better understanding of turbulent movements of galaxy clusters, but they are also a painful and tantalizing taste of what could have been. The data proves just how big of a loss the Hitomi’s destruction was for the study of astronomy.

“It was very exciting to get the science, but it’s devastating to lose the spacecraft,” Andrew Fabian, a member of the Hitomi team from the University of Cambridge, told The Verge. “It feels like a door was opened and we can see through it and then immediately the door is slammed shut.”

Alas, poor Hitomi.