The universe is getting hotter, scientists say

The universe is getting hotter as it gets older, scientists have said.

New research explored the temperature of the universe over the last 10 billion years in an attempt to understand its "thermal history".

They found that the average temperature of gas across the whole cosmos has increased more than 10 times in that period – and today stands at around two million degrees Celsius.

The research – published last month in the Astrophysical Journal – relied on and confirmed work by Jim Peebles, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the large-scale structure of the universe. The heating is a result of that structure and how it changes over time, as a result of the galaxies and galaxy clusters move around.