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This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the spiral galaxy NGC 105, which lies roughly 215 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While it looks like NGC 105 is plunging edge-on into a collision with a neighbouring galaxy, this is just the result of the chance alignment of the two objects in the night sky. NGC 105’s elongated neighbour is actually far more distant and remains relatively unknown to astronomers. These misleading conjunctions occur frequently in astronomy — for example, the stars in constellations are at vastly different distances from Earth, and only appear to form patterns thanks to the chance alignment of their component stars.
The Wide Field Camera 3 observations in this image are from a vast collection of Hubble measurements examining nearby galaxies which contain two fascinating astronomical phenomena — Cepheid variables and cataclysmic supernova explosions. Whilst these two phenomena may appear to be unrelated — one is a peculiar class of pulsating stars and the other is the explosion caused by the catastrophic final throes of a massive star’s life — they are both used by astronomers for a very particular purpose: measuring the vast distances to astronomical objects. Both Cepheids and supernovae have very predictable luminosities, meaning that astronomers can tell precisely how bright they are. By measuring how bright they appear when observed from Earth, these “standard candles” can provide reliable distance measurements. NGC 105 contains both supernovae and Cepheid variables, giving astronomers a valuable opportunity to calibrate the two distance measurement techniques against one another.
Astronomers recently carefully analysed the distances to a sample of galaxies including NGC 105 to measure how fast the Universe is expanding — a value known as the Hubble constant. Their results don’t agree with the predictions of the most widely-accepted cosmological model, and their analysis shows that there is only a 1-in-a-million chance that this discrepancy was caused by measurement errors. This discrepancy between galaxy measurements and cosmological predictions has been a long-standing source of consternation for astronomers, and these recent findings provide persuasive new evidence that something is either wrong or lacking in our standard model of cosmology.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Jones, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: R. Colombari
Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity. They contain enormous amounts of superheated gas, with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, which glows brightly in X-rays, and can be observed across millions of light years between the galaxies. This image of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster combines X-rays from Chandra (diffuse blue emission) with optical light data from Hubble (red, green, and blue).
Image credit: NASA/CXC; Optical: NASA/STScI
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Two enormous galaxies capture your attention in this spectacular image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The galaxy on the left is a lenticular galaxy, named 2MASX J03193743+4137580. The side-on spiral galaxy on the right is more simply named UGC 2665. Both galaxies lie approximately 350 million light-years from Earth, and they both form part of the huge Perseus galaxy cluster.
Perseus is an important figure in Greek mythology, renowned for slaying Medusa the Gorgon – who is herself famous for the unhappy reason that she was cursed to have living snakes for hair. Given Perseus’s impressive credentials, it seems appropriate that the galaxy cluster is one of the biggest objects in the known universe, consisting of thousands of galaxies, only a few of which are visible in this image. The wonderful detail in the image is thanks to the WFC3’s powerful resolution and sensitivity to both visible and near-infrared light, the wavelengths captured in this image.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Harris; Acknowledgment: L. Shatz
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En esta imagen se pueden apreciar hasta 30 galaxias lejanas de las aproximadamente 1.500 que contiene el cúmulo de virgo, donde se encuentran.
Las dos galaxias centrales están interactuando gravitacionalmente entre ellas.
Realizada la noche del sábado 17 de marzo, des de Àger (Lleida).
Son 32 exposiciones de 300 segundos, 2:40h de integración total.
Con Canon eos 600D modificada, telescopio Skywatcher 150/750 pds sobre montura skywatcher neq6 pro2. Guiado con Phd2, cámara zwo asi 290mc y celestron 130/650.
Astronomers have discovered what can happen when a giant black hole does not intervene in the life of a galaxy cluster. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes they have shown that passive black hole behavior may explain a remarkable torrent of star formation occurring in a distant cluster of galaxies.
Galaxy clusters contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies pervaded by hot, X-ray emitting gas that outweighs the combined mass of all the galaxies. Ejections of material powered by a supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy usually prevent this hot gas from cooling to form vast numbers of stars. This heating allows supermassive black holes to influence or control the activity and evolution of their host cluster.
But what happens if that black hole stops being active? The galaxy cluster SpARCS104922.6+564032.5 (SpARCS1049 for short) located 9.9 billion light years away from Earth is supplying one answer.
Based on observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers had previously discovered stars were forming at an extraordinary rate of about 900 new Suns worth of mass per year in SpARCS1049. This is over 300 times faster than the rate at which our galaxy, the Milky Way, is forming its stars. (At the rate seen in SpARCS1049, all of the stars in the Milky Way could form in just 100 million years, which is a short period of time compared to our Galaxy’s age of more than ten billion years.)
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/Univ. of Montreal/J. Hlavacek-Larrondo et al; Optical: NASA/STScI
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
A wide-field view of the Fornax Cluster, a cluster of Galaxies 62 million light-years from Earth. It is the second richest Galaxy cluster within 100 million light-years, after the considerably larger Virgo Cluster. It lies primarily in the Southern constellation Fornax, with its boundaries partially crossing into the constellation of Eridanus. The Galaxy Cluster covers an area of sky about 6° of arc across (and is a part of larger Fornax Wall).
NGC 1365 is the prominent Galaxy on the right, also known as "The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy", and on the left of the image NGC 1399 is the large Elliptical Galaxy.
A few quotes:
"There is an odd mannequin shape that is presented by the distribution of galaxies. This work has been done mainly by Margaret Geller with her collaborator John Huchra at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. It's a little like soap bubbles in a bathtub or dishwashing detergent. The galaxies are on the surfaces of the bubbles. The insides of the bubbles seem to have no galaxies in them at all." - Carl Sagan - Cosmos - The Edge of Forever (S01E10).
The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth." - Carl Sagan - Cosmos - The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean (S01E01).
About this image:
Imaged in LRGB over several sessions in October 2019 from the Southern Hemisphere.
Image Acquisition & Plate Solving:
SGP Mosaic and Framing Wizard.
PlaneWave PlateSolve 2 via SGP.
Integration time:
22 hours.
Processing:
Pre-Processing and Linear workflow in PixInsight,
and finished in Photoshop.
Astrometry info:
Center RA, Dec: 53.874, -35.727
Center RA, hms: 03h 35m 29.728s
Center Dec, dms: -35° 43' 37.706"
Size: 90.9 x 58.9 arcmin.
Radius: 0.903 deg.
Pixel scale: 3.41 arcsec/pixel.
Orientation: Up is 44.4 degrees E of N.
View an Aannotated Sky Chart for this image.
View this image in the WorldWideTelescope.
&creditsUrl=&ra=53.514137&dec=-35.757465&x=1043.1&y=711.1&rotation=135.65&thumb=http://nova.astrometry.net/image/7225988){kind=link}
Also see:
The Markarian's Chain of Galaxies.
This image is part of the Legacy Series.
Photo usage and Copyright:
Medium-resolution photograph licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Terms (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). For High-resolution Royalty Free (RF) licensing, contact me via my site: Contact.
Martin
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This image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases the emission nebula NGC 2313. Emission nebulae are bright, diffuse clouds of ionized gas that emit their own light.
The bright star V565 (center of the image) highlights a silvery, fan-shaped veil of gas and dust, while the right half of this image is obscured by a dense cloud of dust. Nebulae with similar shapes were once called “cometary nebulae” because the star with an accompanying bright fan looked like a comet with a bright tail.
The language that astronomers use changes as we become better acquainted with the universe, and astronomical history is littered with now-obsolete phrases to describe objects in the night sky, such as “spiral nebulae” for spiral galaxies.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai
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This packed ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week showcases the galaxy cluster ACO S 295, as well as a jostling crowd of background galaxies and foreground stars. Galaxies of all shapes and sizes populate this image, ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals. As well as a range of sizes, this galactic menagerie boasts a range of orientations, with spiral galaxies such as the one at the centre of this image appearing almost face on, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light.
The cluster dominates the centre of this image, both visually and physically. The huge mass of the galaxy cluster has gravitationally lensed the background galaxies, distorting and smearing their shapes. As well as providing astronomers with a natural magnifying glass with which to study distant galaxies, gravitational lensing has subtly framed the centre of this image, producing a visually striking scene.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Pacaud, D. Coe; CC BY 4.0
The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another — indeed, the long trails of stars and gas extending from them both give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, however, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is actually interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies have caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our Solar System's perspective, ressembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
NGC 7764A, which lies about 425 million light years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, is a fascinating example of just how awkward astronomical nomenclature can be. The three galaxies are individually referred to as NGC 7764A1, NGC 7764A2 and NGC 7764A3, and just to be really difficult, an entirely separate galaxy, named NGC 7764, sits in the skies about a Moon’s distance (as seen from Earth) away. This rather haphazard naming makes more sense when we consider that many of the catalogues for keeping track of celestial bodies were compiled well over 100 years ago, long before modern technology made standardising scientific terminology much easier. As it is, many astronomical objects have several different names, or might have names that are so similar to other objects’ names that they cause confusion.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL, DECam, CTIO, NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, ESO; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image spotlights the giant elliptical galaxy, UGC 10143, at the heart of galaxy cluster, Abell 2147, about 486 million light-years away in the head of the serpent, the constellation Serpens. UGC 10143 is the biggest and brightest member of Abell 2147, which itself may be part of the much larger Hercules Supercluster of galaxies. UGC 10143’s bright center, dim extended halo, and lack of spiral arms and star-forming dust lanes distinguish it as an elliptical galaxy. Ellipticals are often near the center of galaxy clusters, suggesting they may form when galaxies merge.
This image of UGC 10143 is part of a Hubble survey of globular star clusters associated with the brightest galaxies in galaxy clusters. Globular star clusters help astronomers trace the origin and evolution of their galactic neighbors. The Hubble survey looked at the distribution, brightness, and metal content of more than 35,000 globular star clusters.
The image uses data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Any gaps were filled by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and the Pan-STARRS collaboration. The color blue represents visible blue light, and reddish-orange represents near infrared light.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and W. Harris (McMaster University); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
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A vast galaxy cluster lurks in the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Like a submerged sea monster causing waves on the surface, this cosmic leviathan can be identified by the distortions in spacetime around it. The cluster’s enormous mass curves spacetime, creating a gravitational lens that bends the light from distant galaxies beyond the cluster. The contorted streaks and arcs of light we see in this image are the result. A host of other galaxies surrounds the cluster, and a handful of foreground stars with tell-tale diffraction spikes are scattered throughout the image.
This particular galaxy cluster, called eMACS J1823.1+7822, lies almost nine billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. It is one of five exceptionally massive galaxy clusters Hubble explored with the aim of measuring the strengths of these gravitational lenses, which would provide insights into the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters. Strong gravitational lenses like eMACS J1823.1+7822 can help astronomers study distant galaxies by acting as vast natural telescopes which magnify objects that would otherwise be too faint or distant to resolve.
This multiwavelength image layers data from eight different filters and two different instruments: Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. Both instruments can view astronomical objects in just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum using filters, which allow astronomers to image objects at precisely selected wavelengths. The combination of observations at different wavelengths lets astronomers develop a more complete picture of the structure, composition, and behavior of an object than visible light alone would reveal.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
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This new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope looks at two spiral galaxies, collectively known as Arp 303. The pair, individually called IC 563 (bottom right) and IC 564 (top left), are 275 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sextans.
The image holds data from two separate Hubble observations of Arp 303. The first used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study the pair’s clumpy star-forming regions in infrared light. Galaxies like IC 563 and IC 564 are very bright at infrared wavelengths and host many bright star-forming regions.
The second used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to take quick looks at bright, interesting galaxies across the sky. The observations filled gaps in Hubble’s archive and looked for promising candidates that Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, and other telescopes could study further.
The colors red, orange, and green represent infrared wavelengths taken with WFC3, and the color blue represents ACS visible light data.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Larson (STScI), and J. Dalcanton (University of Washington); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
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Astronomers have revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). Webb’s view displays three clusters of galaxies – already massive – coming together to form a megacluster. The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
#NASA #STScI #jwst #jameswebbspacetelescope #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #galaxy #galaxycluster
A menagerie of interesting astronomical finds are visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In addition to several large elliptical galaxies, a ring-shaped galaxy is lurking on the right of the image. A pair of bright stars are also visible at the left of the image, notable for their colorful crisscrossing diffraction spikes. This collection of astronomical curiosities is the galaxy cluster ACO S520, located in the constellation Pictor and captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
ACO S520 represents one of a series of Hubble observations searching for massive, luminous galaxy clusters that had not been captured by earlier surveys. Astronomers took advantage of occasional gaps in Hubble's busy schedule to capture images of these barely explored galaxy clusters, revealing a wealth of interesting targets for further study with Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
Galaxy clusters are among the largest known objects in the universe. Studying these objects can provide insights into the distribution of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up most of the mass of a galaxy cluster.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
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The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices and is one of several jellyfish galaxies Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment: a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbors, which can twist galaxies into a variety of shapes. If that was not enough, the space between galaxies in a cluster is also pervaded with a searingly hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. While this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting against a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.
This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram-pressure stripping and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved through the cluster, the pressure of the intracluster medium stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disk of the galaxy.
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy disk.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
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A menagerie of interesting astronomical finds fill this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. As well as several large elliptical galaxies, a ring-shaped galaxy is lurking on the right of this image. A pair of bright stars are also visible at the left of this image, notable for their colourful criss-crossing diffraction spikes. This collection of astronomical curiosities is the galaxy cluster ACO S520 in the constellation Pictor, which was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
This is one of a series of Hubble observations searching for massive, luminous galaxy clusters that had not been captured by earlier surveys. Appropriately, the proposal for observing time was named "They almost got away"! Astronomers took advantage of occasional gaps in Hubble's busy schedule to capture images of these barely-explored galaxy clusters, revealing a wealth of interesting targets for further study with Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
Galaxy clusters are among the largest known objects in the Universe, and studying these objects can provide insights into the distribution of dark matter, which is responsible for most of the mass of a galaxy cluster. The vast masses of galaxy clusters is what causes many of them to act as gravitational lenses which distort and magnify light from even more distant objects. This can allow astronomers to use galaxy clusters as a kind of natural gravitational telescope to reveal distant objects that would usually be too faint to resolve — even for the crystal-clear vision of Hubble.
[Image description: A collection of oval-shaped, elliptical galaxies. The largest has two neighbouring bright spots in the core. It and two others look like galaxy clusters, with surrounding smaller galaxies. On the left edge of the image are two bright stars with four long spikes, and on the right edge is a small ring-shaped galaxy. Smaller stars and galaxies are spread evenly across the dark background.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling; CC BY 4.0
The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.
What's going on? In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance.
This sort of "tug-of-war" between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other's gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.
In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.
The spiral galaxy lies 120 million light-years away, in the northern constellation Cepheus.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Paul Sell (University of Florida)
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With the final observation of the distant galaxy cluster Abell 370 – some five billion light-years away – the Frontier Fields program came to an end.
Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters in which astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, the warping of spacetime by the cluster's gravitational field that distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This manifests as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies.
Read more: The final frontier of the Frontier Fields [heic1711]
Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields, CC BY 4.0
The barred spiral galaxy known as NGC 4907 shows its starry face from 270 million light-years away to anyone who can see it from the Northern Hemisphere. This is a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the face-on galaxy, displaying its beautiful spiral arms, wound loosely around its central bright bar of stars.
Shining brightly below the galaxy is a star that is actually within our own Milky Way galaxy. This star appears much brighter than the billions of stars in NGC 4907 as it is 100,000 times closer, residing only 2,500 light-years away.
NGC 4907 is also part of the Coma Cluster, a group of over 1,000 galaxies, some of which can be seen around NGC 4907 in this image. This massive cluster of galaxies lies within the constellation of Coma Berenices, which is named for the locks of Queen Berenice II of Egypt: the only constellation named after a historical person.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gregg
Galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the universe held together by gravity, are dynamic environments containing individual galaxies and huge amounts of hot gas and dark matter. Often, an enormous black hole in the center of a cluster can help drive its behavior. In the galaxy cluster Abell 2597, a giant central supermassive black hole is driving the gas outward and creating bubbles, or voids, within it. This composite image of Abell 2597 includes X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey (orange), and emission from hydrogen atoms in optical light from the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile (red).
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
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Astronomers have captured a spectacular, ongoing collision between at least three galaxy clusters. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton, and a trio of radio telescopes is helping astronomers sort out what is happening in this jumbled scene. Collisions and mergers like this are the main way that galaxy clusters can grow into the gigantic cosmic edifices seen today. These also act as the largest particle accelerators in the universe.
The giant galaxy cluster forming from this collision is Abell 2256, located 780 million light-years from Earth. This composite image of Abell 2256 combines X-rays from Chandra and XMM in blue with radio data collected by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) all in red, plus optical and infrared data from Pan-STARRs in white and pale yellow.
Astronomers studying this object are trying to tease out what has led to this unusual-looking structure. Each telescope tells a different part of the story. Galaxy clusters are some of the biggest objects in the universe containing hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies. In addition, they contain enormous reservoirs of superheated gas, with temperatures of several million degrees Fahrenheit. Only X-ray telescopes like Chandra and XMM can see this hot gas. A labeled version of the figure shows gas from two of the galaxy clusters, with the third blended too closely to separate from the others.
Image credit: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Bolonga/K. Rajpurohit et al.; XMM-Newton: ESA/XMM-Newton/Univ. of Bolonga/K. Rajpurohit et al. Radio: LOFAR: LOFAR/ASTRON; GMRT: NCRA/TIFR/GMRT; VLA: NSF/NRAO/VLA; Optical/IR: Pan-STARRS
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This 2008 view of the Bullet Cluster, located about 3.8 billion light years from Earth, shows data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This cluster, officially known as 1E 0657-56, was formed after the violent collision of two large clusters of galaxies. Scientists have examined this system with Chandra and Compton to look for evidence of antimatter in the cluster's hot gas. The results did not reveal the signature for the collision of matter and antimatter, meaning that there is little or no antimatter in the Bullet Cluster, at most 3 parts per million. The X-ray emission shows the amount of hot gas in this system.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.
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This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope contains three different images of the same supernova-hosting galaxy, all of which were created by a colossal gravitational lens. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light travelling past or through it, almost like a vast lens. In this case, the lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. This annotated image of the cluster highlights the three images of the lensed galaxy, including the one where the supernova was detected.
Astronomers discovered the supernova in the triply-lensed background galaxy using observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and they suspected that they had found a very distant Type Ia supernova. These supernovae always produce a fairly consistent luminosity — at the same distance, one looks as bright as any other — which makes them particularly helpful to astronomers. As their distance from Earth is proportional to how dim they appear in the night sky, objects with known brightness can be used as 'standard candles' to measure astronomical distances.
The gravitational lens has created three lensed images of the background galaxy, which are not uniform in size, position or age. Because mass in the galaxy cluster is distributed unevenly, rays of light emitted by the supernova are bent by the lens in different amounts, and so they take longer or shorter paths to the viewer — resulting in separate images. The light that took the longest path gives us the oldest image of the galaxy, in which the supernova is still visible. The next image is of the galaxy as it appears roughly 320 days later than the first one, and the last image roughly 1000 days after the first. At both later points in time, the supernova has already faded from view. The name for the transient is AT 2022riv.
This observation was captured by Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera to measure the brightness of the lensed supernova. As part of the same programme, NIRSpec spectroscopy of the supernova was also obtained, which will allow comparison of this distant supernova to Type Ia supernovae in the nearby Universe. This is an important way to verify that one of astronomers’ tried-and-tested methods of measuring vast distances works as expected.
[Image description: The main image shows a large elliptical galaxy, surrounded by many small similar galaxies in a cluster, and background stars and galaxies. Three smaller pull-outs show three lensed images of a background galaxy, close up.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Kelly
This 2008 image of M84, a massive elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, about 55 million light years from Earth, shows X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. A number of bubbles generated from the supermassive black hole at the center of this giant galaxy are visible in this image. The particles that create these bubbles travel outward from the black hole in the form of a two-sided jet. Smaller bubbles are found within larger ones, and this nesting provides clear evidence for repeated outbursts from the central black hole.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/MPE/A.Finoguenov et al.
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On February 24, 1987, observers in the southern hemisphere saw a new object in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This was one of the brightest supernova explosions in centuries and soon became known as Supernova 1987A (SN 87A). The Chandra data (blue) show the location of the supernova's shock wave — similar to the sonic boom from a supersonic plane — interacting with the surrounding material about four light years from the original explosion point. Optical data from Hubble (orange and red) also shows evidence for this interaction in the ring.
Image credit: NASA/CXC; Optical: NASA/STScI
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What will be the next star in our Milky Way galaxy to explode as a supernova? Astronomers aren't certain, but one candidate is in Eta Carinae, a volatile system containing two massive stars that closely orbit each other. This image has three types of light: optical data from Hubble (appearing as white), ultraviolet (cyan) from Hubble, and X-rays from Chandra (appearing as purple emission). The previous eruptions of this star have resulted in a ring of hot, X-ray emitting gas about 2.3 light years in diameter surrounding these two stars.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Ultraviolet/Optical: NASA/STScI; Combined Image: NASA/ESA/N. Smith (University of Arizona), J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute) and A. Pagan
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This extraordinary image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy cluster Abell 2813 (also known as ACO 2813) has an almost delicate beauty, which also illustrates the remarkable physics at work within it. The image spectacularly demonstrates the concept of gravitational lensing.
Among the tiny dots, spirals, and ovals that are the galaxies belonging to the cluster, there are several distinct crescent shapes. These curved arcs of light aren’t curved galaxies. They are strong examples of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.
Gravitational lensing occurs when an object’s mass causes light to bend. The curved crescents and “S” shapes are light from galaxies that lie beyond Abell 2813. The galaxy cluster has so much mass that it acts as a gravitational lens, bending light from more distant galaxies around it. These distortions can appear as many different shapes, such as long lines or arcs.
This visual evidence, that mass causes light to bend, is famously used as proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Coe
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This packed image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases the galaxy cluster ACO S 295, as well as a jostling crowd of background galaxies and foreground stars. Galaxies of all shapes and sizes populate this image, ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals. This galactic menagerie boasts a range of orientations and sizes, with spiral galaxies such as the one at the center of this image appearing almost face on, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light.
The galaxy cluster dominates the center of this image, both visually and physically. The cluster’s huge mass has gravitationally lensed the light from background galaxies, distorting and smearing their shapes. In addition to providing astronomers with a natural magnifying glass with which to study distant galaxies, gravitational lensing has subtly framed the center of this image, producing a visually striking scene.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Pacaud, D. Coe
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New observations made with ESA’s X-ray XMM Newton telescope have revealed an “orphan cloud” – an isolated cloud in a galaxy cluster that is the first discovery of its kind.
A lot goes on in a galaxy cluster. There can be anything from tens to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. The galaxies themselves have a range of different properties, but typically contain systems with stars and planets, along with the material in between the stars – the interstellar medium. In between the galaxies is more material – tenuous hot gas known as the intercluster medium. And sometimes in all the chaos, some of the interstellar medium can get ripped out of a galaxy and get stranded in an isolated region of the cluster, as this new study reveals.
Unexpected discovery
Abell 1367, also known as the Leo Cluster, is a young cluster that contains around 70 galaxies and is located around 300 million light-years from Earth. In 2017, a small warm gas cloud of unknown origin was discovered in A1367 by the Subaru telescope in Japan. A follow-up X-ray survey to study other aspects of A1367 unexpectedly discovered X-rays emanating from this cloud, revealing that the cloud is actually bigger than the Milky Way.
This is the first time an intercluster clump has been observed in both X-rays and the light that comes from the warm gas. Since the orphan cloud is isolated and not associated with any galaxy, it has likely been floating in the space between galaxies for a long time, making its mere survival surprising.
The discovery of this orphan cloud was made by Chong Ge at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and colleagues, and the study has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Along with data from XMM-Newton and Subaru, Chong and colleagues also used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the cluster in visible light.
The orphan cloud is the blue umbrella-shaped part of the image. It has been colour-coded to show the X-ray part of the cloud in blue, the warm gas in red, and the visible region in white shows some of the galaxies in the cluster. The part of the cloud that had been discovered in 2017 (in red) overlaps with the X-ray at the bottom of the cloud.
How the cloud became an orphan
It was previously thought that the distribution of material between galaxies is smooth, however more recent X-ray studies have revealed the presence of clumps in clusters. It was theorised that clumps of gas in the clusters were originally the gas that exists between stars in individual galaxies. The intercluster gas acts as a wind that is strong enough to pull the interstellar gas out of the galaxy as the galaxy is moving through the cluster. However, observations showing that intercluster clumps are originally stripped interstellar material have never been made until now. The observation of the warm gas in the clump provides the evidence to show that this orphan cloud originated within a galaxy. Interstellar material is much cooler than intercluster material, and the temperature of the orphan cloud matches that of interstellar gas. The researchers were also able to determine why the orphan cloud has survived for as long as it has. An isolated cloud would be expected to be ripped apart by instabilities caused by velocity and density differences. However, they found that a magnetic field in the cloud would be able to suppress these instabilities.
Searching for the parent galaxy
It is likely that the parent galaxy of the orphan cloud is a massive one as the mass of the X-ray gas in the orphan is substantial. It is possible that the parent might one day be discovered with future observations by following some breadcrumbs. For example, there are traces of the warm gas that extend beyond the orphan cloud that could be used to identify the parent with more data. There are other unsolved mysteries regarding the cloud that could be deciphered with more observations, such as mysterious offset between the brightest X-rays and the brightest light from the warm gas.
A closer inspection of this orphan will also further our understanding of the evolution of stripped interstellar medium at such a great distance from its parent galaxy and will provide a rare laboratory to study other things such as turbulence and heat conduction. This study paves the way for research on intercluster clumps, as future warm gas surveys can now be targeted to search for other orphan clouds.
Credits: Ge et al (2021)
The narrow galaxy elegantly curving around its spherical companion in this image is a fantastic example of a truly strange and very rare phenomenon. This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (The Furnace). GAL-CLUS-022058s is the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our Universe. The object has been nicknamed by the Principal Investigator and his team who are studying this Einstein ring as the "Molten Ring", which alludes to its appearance and host constellation.
First theorised to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, this object’s unusual shape can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy has been distorted into the curve we see by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of it. The near exact alignment of the background galaxy with the central elliptical galaxy of the cluster, seen in the middle of this image, has warped and magnified the image of the background galaxy around itself into an almost perfect ring. The gravity from other galaxies in the cluster is soon to cause additional distortions.
Objects like these are the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Jha; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
This image of the galaxy cluster Abell 1775 show X-rays from Chandra, optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, and radio data from the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) in the Netherlands. A tail from the merged cluster is seen, along with a region of gas with a curved edge, called a "cold front", that is denser and cooler than the gas it is plowing into (see labeled version). The tail and the cold front all curve in the same direction, creating a spiral appearance. These features are the result of two galaxy clusters — the largest structures held together by gravity — crashing into one another, one of the most energetic events in the Universe.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Leiden Univ./A. Botteon et al.; Radio: LOFAR/ASTRON; Optical/IR:PanSTARRS
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A region of the sky particularly rich in galaxies, known as the Virgo Cluster and including several prominent members catalogued long ago: M884, M86, M87, M88, M89, M90, and M91, in addition to numerous others smaller and fainter galaxies. The arc of galaxies on the right is sometimes called Markarian's Chain.
2x3 mosaic each tile consisting of up to 30 exposures of five minutes each. Explore Scientific ED102 102mm f/7 refractor, 0.8x reducer/flattener, ZWO ASI294MC camera, UV/IR cutoff filter, iOptron CEM25P mount, ASIAir controller. Processed in Astro Pixel Processor, and Lightroom.
The discovery of the most distant galaxy cluster with a specific important trait – as described in our press release – is providing insight into how these gigantic structures formed and why the universe looks like it does in the present day.
This composite image shows SPT-CL J2215-3537 (SPT2215 for short) in X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) and a combination of ultraviolet, optical, and infrared light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (cyan and orange). Astronomers used Chandra to find this distant and unusually young galaxy cluster, along with NSF/DOE’s South Pole Telescope, the Dark Energy Survey project in Chile and NASA’s Spitzer Observatory. The results have been reported in a series of three papers.
SPT2215 is located about 8.4 billion light-years from Earth. This means it is seen when the universe is only 5.3 billion years old, compared to its current age of 13.8 billion years. While there have been many clusters seen at this large distance, SPT2215 possesses a quality that makes its whereabouts particularly intriguing. SPT is what astronomers refer to as “relaxed,” meaning that it shows no signs of having been disrupted by violent collisions with other clusters of galaxies.
Galaxy clusters – some of the biggest structures in the universe -- grow over time by merging with other galaxy clusters or groups, causing disturbances such as asymmetries or sharp features in the cluster’s gas. Given enough time to “relax,” however, the gas can take on a smooth, calm appearance, as seen with SPT2215. Until the identification of SPT2215, astronomers had not found a relaxed galaxy cluster this far away. In fact, scientists were not sure they would find a galaxy cluster that was relaxed at this epoch of the universe, because they are usually still undergoing the turmoil of mergers with other clusters or groups of galaxies as they increase in size.
Another interesting aspect of SPT2215 is the evidence for large amounts of star formation happening in its center. SPT2215 has a very large galaxy in its middle, which in turn has a supermassive black hole at its core. The prodigious amount of star formation shows scientists that much of the hot has cooled to the point where new stars can form, without outbursts driven by the black hole providing a heating source that prevents most of this cooling. This addresses an ongoing question of how much black holes stymie or support the birth of stars in their environments.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/M. Calzadilla; UV/Optical/Near-IR/IR: NASA/STScI/HST; Image processing: N. Wolk
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Seen here in incredible detail, thanks to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the starburst galaxy formally known as PLCK G045.1+61.1. The galaxy, which appears as multiple reddish dots near the center of the image, is being gravitationally lensed by a cluster of closer galaxies, also seen in the image.
Gravitational lensing occurs when a large distribution of matter, such as a galaxy cluster, sits between Earth and a distant light source. As space is warped by massive objects, the light from the distant object bends as it travels to us, creating stretched, magnified and sometimes multiple images of the lensed object. This effect was first predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
From 2009 to 2013, the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory captured multiple all-sky surveys. In the course of these surveys, with complementary observations by the Herschel Space Observatory, Planck discovered some of the brightest gravitationally lensed, high-redshift galaxies in the night sky.
It was during the study of these Planck-Herschel selected sources using Hubble that the optical starlight emitted from this ultra-bright galaxy was found.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Frye
This observation from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the massive galaxy cluster RX J2129. Due to Gravitational lensing, this observation contains three different images of the same supernova-hosting galaxy. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light travelling past or through it, almost like a vast lens. In this case, the lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Gravitational lensing can cause background objects to appear strangely distorted, as can be seen by the concentric arcs of light in the upper right of this image.
Astronomers discovered the supernova in the triply-lensed background galaxy using observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and they suspected that they had found a very distant Type Ia supernova. These supernovae always produce a fairly consistent luminosity — at the same distance, one looks as bright as any other — which makes them particularly helpful to astronomers. As their distance from Earth is proportional to how dim they appear in the night sky, objects with known brightness can be used as 'standard candles' to measure astronomical distances.
The almost uniform luminosity of a Type Ia supernova could also allow astronomers to understand how strongly the galaxy cluster RX J2129 is magnifying background objects, and therefore how massive the galaxy cluster is. As well as distorting the images of background objects, gravitational lenses can cause distant objects to appear much brighter than they would otherwise. If the gravitational lens magnifies something with a known brightness, such as a Type Ia supernova, then astronomers can use this to measure the ‘prescription’ of the gravitational lens.
This observation was captured by Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera to measure the brightness of the lensed supernova. As part of the same programme, NIRSpec spectroscopy of the supernova was also obtained, which will allow comparison of this distant supernova to Type Ia supernovae in the nearby Universe. This is an important way to verify that one of astronomers’ tried-and-tested methods of measuring vast distances works as expected.
[Image description: Stars and galaxies, mostly reddish in colour, are scattered across a dark background. In the foreground upper-right corner, a large elliptical galaxy is surrounded by many smaller similar galaxies in a cluster. These galaxies have bright centres and a diffuse white glow around them. The large galaxy has distorted images and arcs around it.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Kelly
Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory have captured the X-ray glow (shown here in purple) emitted by the hot gas that pervades the galaxy cluster XLSSC006.
The cluster is home to a few hundreds of galaxies, large amounts of diffuse, X-ray bright gas, and even larger amounts of dark matter, with a total mass equivalent to some 500 trillion solar masses. Because of its distance from us, we are seeing this galaxy cluster as it was when the Universe was only about nine billion years old.
The galaxies that belong to the cluster are concentrated towards the centre, with two dominant members. Since galaxy clusters normally have only one major galaxy at their core, this suggests that XLSSC006 is undergoing a merger event.
Pictured in this view, where the X-ray data are combined with a three-colour composite of optical and near-infrared data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, are a multitude of other galaxies. Some are closer to us than the cluster – like the spiral galaxy towards the top right – and some are farther away. The image also shows a handful of foreground stars belonging to our Milky Way galaxy, which stand out with their diffraction spikes (a common artefact of astronomical images), while the small purple dots sprinkled across the frame are point sources of X-rays, many of them beyond the Milky Way.
The X-ray data were obtained as part of the XXL Survey, XMM-Newton’s largest observational programme to date, with follow-up observations performed by a number of other observatories around the world and in space. The latest XXL Survey release contains data for 365 galaxy clusters, tracing their large-scale distribution across cosmic history. These observations are helping astronomers refine our understanding of the Universe’s structure and evolution, and will serve as a reference for ESA’s future missions Euclid and Athena.
More about the XXL Survey: Tracing the Universe: X-ray survey supports standard cosmological model.
Credits: ESA/XMM-Newton (X-rays); CFHT-LS (optical); XXL Survey
For the first time, astronomers have found two giant clusters of galaxies that are just about to collide, as reported in a new press release by RIKEN. This observation is important in understanding the formation of structure in the Universe, since large-scale structures—such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies—are thought to grow by collisions and mergers.
The composite image shows the separate galaxy clusters 1E2215 and 1E2216, located about 1.2 billion light years from Earth, captured as they enter a critical phase of merging. Chandra’s X-ray data (blue) have been combined with a radio image from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India (red). These images were then overlaid on an optical image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that shows galaxies and stars in the field of view.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIKEN/L. Gu et al; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRT; Optical: SDSS
This galaxy cluster, Abell 2163, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is representative of over 80 clusters that were used to track the effects of dark energy on these massive objects over time. Most of the matter in galaxy clusters is in the form of very hot gas, which emits copious amounts of X-rays. By studying clusters across large distances, astronomers have determined that dark energy has stifled their growth.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/A.Vikhlinin et al.
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This field of view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is centred on the quasar SDSS J165202.64+172852.3. The quasar is an “extremely red” quasar that exists in the very early Universe, 11.5 billion years ago.
Credits: ESA/Hubble, NASA, N. Zakamska
Astronomers taking inventory of the material in the local universe keep coming up short. A new result from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory about a system of colliding galaxy clusters may help explain this shortfall.
Although scientists know a great deal about the composition of the universe, there has been a vexing problem they have struggled to explain – there is a significant amount of matter that has not yet been accounted for.
This missing mass is not the invisible dark matter, which makes up a majority of the matter in the universe. This is a separate puzzle where about a third of the “normal” matter that was created in the first billion years or so after the big bang has yet to be detected by observations of the local universe, that is, in regions less than a few billion light-years from Earth. This matter is made up of hydrogen, helium, and other elements and makes up objects like stars, planets, and humans.
Scientists have proposed that at least some of this missing mass could be hidden in gigantic strands, or filaments, of warm to hot (temperatures of 10,000 to 10,000,000 kelvins) gas in the space in between galaxies and clusters of galaxies. They have dubbed this the “warm-hot intergalactic medium,” or WHIM.
A team of astronomers using Chandra to observe a system of colliding galaxy clusters has likely found evidence of this WHIM residing in the space between them.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/A. Sarkar; Optical: NSF/NOIRLab/WIYN
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Evidence for an awesome upheaval in a massive galaxy cluster was discovered in a 2007 image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The origin of a bright arc of extremely hot gas extending over two million light years requires one of the most energetic events ever detected. There are also hints of a cavity in the hot gas to the upper left.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/R.P.Kraft
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This 2007 multi-wavelength image of Abell 520 shows the aftermath of a complicated collision of galaxy clusters, some of the most massive objects in the Universe. In this image, the hot gas as detected by Chandra is colored red. Optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii and Subaru telescopes shows the starlight from the individual galaxies (yellow and orange). The location of most of the matter in the cluster (blue) was also found using these telescopes, by tracing the subtle light-bending effects on distant galaxies. This material is dominated by dark matter.
Abell 520 has similarities to the so-called Bullet Cluster (also known as 1E0657-56). As with the Bullet Cluster, it appears that the galaxies flew past one another when the clusters collided, as expected. Another parallel is that there are large separations between the regions where the galaxies are most common (see inset for labeled peaks 2 and 4) and where most of the hot gas lies (peak 3).
There are significant differences, however, between Abell 520 and the Bullet Cluster. For example, a concentration of dark matter is found (peak 3) near the bulk of the hot gas, where very few galaxies are found. In addition, there is an area (peak 5) where there are several galaxies but very little dark matter. Both of these features are in contrast to popular theory that says dark matter and galaxies should stay together, even during a violent collision.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UVic./A.Mahdavi et al. Optical/Lensing: CFHT/UVic./A.Mahdavi et al.
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Gravitationally Lensed Galaxy Cluster
By ESA/HUBBLE MAY 7, 2023
TOPICS: Astronomy Astrophysics "European Space Agency" "Gravitational Lensing" "Hubble Space Telescope"
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of a massive galaxy cluster, eMACS J1823.1+7822, that offers insights into dark matter distribution and acts as a natural telescope to study distant objects. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a massive galaxy cluster, eMACS J1823.1+7822, located nine billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. Gravitational lensing caused by the cluster’s mass distorts background galaxies into streaks and arcs of light, offering insights into dark matter distribution.
A vast galaxy cluster lurks in the center of this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like a submerged sea monster causing waves on the surface, this cosmic leviathan can be identified by the distortions in spacetime around it. The mass of the cluster has caused the images of background galaxies to be gravitationally lensed; the galaxy cluster has caused a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light and cause background galaxies to appear distorted into streaks and arcs of light. A host of other galaxies can be seen surrounding the cluster, and a handful of foreground stars with tell-tale diffraction spikes are scattered throughout the image.
Evidence for a recoiling black hole was found using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble, XMM-Newton, and several ground-based telescopes. This black hole kickback was caused either by a slingshot effect produced in a triple black hole system, or from the effects of gravitational waves produced after two supermassive black holes merged a few million years earlier. Of the 2,600 X-ray sources found in this survey, only CID-42 coincides with two very close, compact optical sources. In this 2010 image, the two sources are too close for Chandra to resolve separately.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Civano et al.
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If you put 228 old TV sets together, the poorly synced views on their screens might look a bit like what you see here. But the science behind these images – and the technology required to obtain them – is far more fascinating than what their appearance might suggest.
Rather than pixelated colourful static, the vast majority of these 228 thumbnail images shows dense 'over-concentrations' of far-away galaxies that could be the seeds of the galaxy clusters we see in today’s Universe.
Today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, most galaxies are kept together by gravity into groups or larger clusters, but how and when exactly these cosmic structures first started to form is still an open question. Looking far back in time, astronomers observed collections of galaxies that they believe could be bound together by gravity. If they are right, this image could be showing us the birth of over 200 future galaxy clusters, at a time when the Universe was only three billion years old.
This science feat was possible by combining the powers of Planck and Herschel, two ESA space telescopes that were launched together on an Ariane 5 rocket eleven years ago, on 14 May 2009.
The Planck mission spent more than four years scanning the sky to collect and study the remnant radiation left over after the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. The Herschel space observatory, which also operated until 2013, performed detailed observations of a multitude of regions across the sky from the far infrared to the submillimetre part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This image is part of a study published in 2015, in which a team of astronomers used Planck data to identify more than 2000 rare and very distant sources shining brightly in submillimetre wavelengths. One tenth of these sources were then observed using the SPIRE instrument on Herschel at three different wavelengths – 250, 350 and 500 microns – and combined with existing similar observations.
Unleashing the powers of Herschel, the team was able to ‘zoom in’ into the 228 most promising sources spotted with Planck to find clues about their nature. The evidence pointed to the vast majority of them being infant clusters of galaxies. The Herschel observations revealed in particular that the galaxies were forming stars at an impressive rate – about 700 solar-mass stars per year, roughly 700 times more intensely than our Milky Way does today.
A few years later, astronomers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which completed its mission earlier this year, to scrutinise 82 of the previously spotted candidates in detail at near-infrared wavelengths. The new data showed without ambiguity that most of these objects consist of far-away galaxies in large concentrations. But some mysteries remain: what is the origin of such a prolific star-formation activity? Are these structures real proto-clusters? These questions will keep astronomers busy for a while.
Credits: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/Planck consortia and H. Dole, D. Guéry, IAS, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay
This 2009 Chandra X-ray image shows a divided neighborhood where some 200 hot, young, massive stars reside. Bubbles in the cooler gas and dust have been generated by powerful stellar winds, which are then filled with hot, X-ray emitting gas. Scientists find the amount of hot gas detected in the bubbles on the right side corresponds to the amount entirely powered by winds from the 200 hot massive stars. The situation is different on the left side where the amount of X-ray gas cannot explain the brightness of the X-ray emission. The bubbles on this left side appear to be much older and were likely created and powered by young stars and supernovas in the past.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Tuellmann et al.
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Chandra's 2004 mosaic of images of the Fornax cluster reveals that the vast cloud of ten-million-degree Celsius gas around the giant elliptical galaxy at the cluster's core (labeled "NGC 1399") with a swept-back cometary shape that extends for more than half a million light years. This geometry suggests that the hot gas cloud is moving through a larger, but less dense cloud of gas that creates an intergalactic headwind. The core motion, combined with optical observations of the motion of a group of galaxies falling toward the core, indicates that the cluster lies along a large, unseen, filamentary structure composed mostly of dark matter. Most galaxies, gas, and dark matter in the universe are thought to be concentrated in such filaments, and galaxy clusters are thought to form where the filaments intersect. Two other bright galaxies in the cluster, NGC 1404 and NGC 1387, are also, labeled.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/Columbia U./C.Scharf et al.
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This 2002 Chandra image of the Centaurus galaxy cluster shows a long plume-like feature resembling a twisted sheet. The plume is some 70,000 light years in length and has a temperature of about 10 million degrees Celsius. It is several million degrees cooler than the hot gas around it, as seen in this temperature-coded image in which the sequence red, yellow, green, blue indicates increasing gas temperatures. The cluster is about 170 million light years from Earth.
The plume contains a mass comparable to 1 billion suns. It may have formed by gas cooling from the cluster onto the moving target of the central galaxy, as seen by Chandra in the Abell 1795 cluster. Other possibilities are that the plume consists of debris stripped from a galaxy which fell into the cluster, or that it is gas pushed out of the center of the cluster by explosive activity in the central galaxy. A problem with these ideas is that the plume has the same concentration of heavy elements such as oxygen, silicon, and iron as the surrounding hot gas.
Image credit: NASA/IoA/J.Sanders & A.Fabian
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The cluster of galaxies EMSS 1358+6245 about 4 billion light year away in the constellation Draco is shown in this 2001 Chandra image. When combined with Chandra's X-ray spectrum, this image allowed scientists to determine that the mass of dark matter in the cluster is about 4 times that of normal matter.
The relative percentage of dark matter increases toward the center of the cluster. Measuring the exact amount of the increase enabled astronomers to set limits on the rate at which the dark matter particles collide with each other in the cluster. This information is extremely important to scientists in their quest to understand the nature of dark matter, which is thought to be the most common form of matter in the universe.
Image credit: NASA/MIT/J.Arabadjis et al.