WATCH: Wave of ultra-hot gas, twice the size of Milky Way found moving through space

A research paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has revealed that scientists have found a huge wave of ultra-hot gas rippling through the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster.

The researchers suspect that the wave is the largest ever discovered so far in the universe, and has been rolling through space for a billion years. As reported in Science Daily, the wave is around 200,000 light years across the Milky Way, and it’s twice the size of our home galaxy.

The Perseus galaxy cluster is located in the Perseus constellation around 240 million light-years away, and is around 11 million light-years across, made up of a number of galaxies surrounded by a vast cloud of scorching hot gas that's so hot it only glows in X-rays.

As per the report, the researchers saw something odd - a strange 'bay' shape that kept appearing without any clear origin.

At first they thought it might have something to do with a black hole in the region, but using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory combined with radio observations and computer simulations, scientists have now discovered that this 'bay' shape is actually a giant wave.

Using computer simulations, the  team suggests that billions of years ago, the galaxy cluster was settled, with a cooler central region of gas reaching temperatures around 30 million degrees Celsius, surrounded by an area with gas three times hotter.

But then a smaller galaxy cluster seems to have grazed past Perseus, sloshing those two regions together like cream stirred into coffee, creating an expanding spiral of cold gas.

Over the next 2.5 billion years, the researchers predict that the gas spread about 500,000 light-years from the centre of the cluster, creating massive waves that roll around the edges for hundreds of million of years before dissipating.

Getting more insight into how waves in galaxy clusters such as Perseus form and evolve doesn't just help us understand our Universe, it also allows the researchers to get an idea of the strength of the cluster's magnetic field.