Giant Galaxy Cluster Acts as Cosmic Furnace

HSC J023336-053022, a massive galaxy cluster located approximately 4 billion light-years away from Earth, is heating the material within it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius — over 25 times hotter than the core of the Sun.

Galaxy clusters contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes.

Typically, they have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun and form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together.

Different sub-groups of galaxies can also form within a single cluster, as in the case of HSC J023336-053022.

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. Image credit: Green Bank Observatory / National Science Foundation / Subaru Telescope / National Astronomical Observatory of Japan / HSC-SSP Collaboration / ESA / XMM-Newton / XXL Survey Consortium.

This composite image shows the galaxy cluster HSC J023336-053022, also known as ACT-CL J0233.6-0530 or XLSSC 105.

wo blue-purple circles in the composite image above mark the locations of two sub-clusters within HSC J023336-053022 which are slowly moving towards and colliding with one another, ‘shock heating’ gas to intense temperatures in the process.

To create this image, three different international teams of astronomers explored observations of the cluster across the electromagnetic spectrum, in order to isolate and pinpoint different aspects of this region of space.

These aspects are shown here in different colors:

(i) individual galaxies within the cluster show up in orange;

(ii) dark matter, which maps the location of the two sub-clusters, in blue;

(iii) hot, dense gas shows up in green, while hot, thin, high-pressure gas shows up in red; this gas is something known as the ‘intracluster medium,’ which permeates galaxy clusters and fills the space between galaxies.

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A Tour of Bending the Bridge Between Two Galaxy Clusters

Several hundred million years ago, two galaxy clusters collided and then passed through each other. This mighty event released a flood of hot gas from each galaxy cluster that formed an unusual bridge between the two objects. This bridge is now being pummeled by particles driven away from a supermassive black hole.

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity. They contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies, vast amounts of multi-million-degree gas that glow in X-rays, and enormous reservoirs of unseen dark matter.

A new image containing different kinds of light reveals the giant structures that can result when two galaxy clusters collide. This view of Abell 2384 has X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, as well as radio data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey. This new view reveals the effects of a jet shooting away from a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy in one of the clusters. The jet is so powerful that it is bending the shape of the gas bridge, which extends for over 3 million light years and has the mass of about 6 trillion Suns.