In the late 20th century, the observation of a type one-A supernova led to the discovery of accelerating expansion of our Universe. Up until now, however, scientists have not been able to fathom the energy driving this acceleration. Referred to as “Dark Energy,” this mysterious energy behaves like “anti-gravity,” pushing objects away from each other. Fortunately, the effects of this Dark Energy can be analyzed by focusing on the number and distribution of galaxy clusters, which are the largest objects in the known Universe.
Galaxy clusters are, however, uncommon and locating them requires scanning a significant portion of the sky with extremely sophisticated telescopes. One such telescope, the eROSITA X-ray space telescope, launched in 2019 by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, is set to carry out the deepest full-sky survey in X-rays. Nonetheless, a dataset from a mini-survey called the eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS), containing a sample of about 550 galaxy clusters, has already been published.
Against this backdrop, a research group led by Professor I-Non Chiu from National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan decided to conduct the first cosmological study on the eFEDS data, which also serves as the first cosmological study on galaxy clusters identified by eROSITA. Their paper was published in Volume 522, Issue 2 of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on April 21, 2023.
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