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.

Two 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.

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Combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with radio observations and computer simulations, scientists have found a vast wave of hot gas in the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster.

Spanning some 200,000 light-years, the wave is about twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers say the wave formed billions of years ago, after a small galaxy cluster grazed Perseus and caused its vast supply of gas to slosh around an enormous volume of space.