An international team led by astronomers Gyula Józsa, Michelle Cluver, and Thomas Jarrett has utilized the South African MeerKAT telescope to discover a mysterious chain of hydrogen gas clouds the size of a massive galaxy. 

Indeed, the accumulation of so much elemental hydrogen without associated stellar components is the largest yet discovered. Appearing at the edge of a relatively massive group of galaxies, there is the possibility that the cloud chain is gas stripped from group-member galaxies, but it may also be primordial and gravitationally drawn into the group through a cosmic filament pathway.

Whatever the case, MeerKAT is proving to be a ground-breaking telescope, and this “dark” cloud discovery should soon be followed by many such discoveries in the exciting days ahead.

The discovery of the mystery clouds will be published in the renowned Astrophysical Journal under the title: “The detection of a massive chain of dark HI clouds in the GAMA G23 Field”

Read here the press release about this discovery by the South African Radio Astronomical Observatory (SARAO): https://www.sarao.ac.za/media-releases/meerkat-discovers-mystery-clouds/

This discovery was also facilitated by the use of a new VR data exploration tool called iDaVIE that is under development at the IDIA visualisation Lab - https://vislab.idia.ac.za/ - in collaboration with INAF. The beta version of this tool is already available to the public at https://idavie.readthedocs.io/.