Associate Professor Brice Ménard and former postdoctoral fellow in the department, Yi-Kuan Chiang, have published research in Astrophysical Journal that demonstrates how the temperature of galaxy clusters today, on average, is 10 times hotter than 10 billion years ago.
“We have measured temperatures throughout the history of the universe,” said Ménard, “As time has gone on, all those clusters of galaxies are getting hotter and hotter because their gravity pulls more and more gas toward them.”
The research team used a technique that Ménard developed with Chiang. With it, they estimated the redshift of gas concentrations seen in images of microwave light going back in time all the way to 10 billion years ago. They call the new tool the Tomographer and it is able to explore the redshift distribution of any source catalog or sky map, using the a clustering-redshift technique.