Astronomy Now Online


Top Stories


New model helps explain youthful supernovae

...A new computer model shows how the most youthful type of Ia supernovae could occur within just 100 million years of their formation...

read more

Cool stars have different life forming ingredients

...New data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that planets around cooler stars than our own Sun might have a different set of life-forming ingredients to our Solar System's primordial soup...

read more

Most detailed map of nearby Universe completed

...A team of international astronomers has completed the most detailed survey of galaxies in the nearby Universe, which not only maps their location, but details their direction and speed of motion, too...

read more



Spaceflight Now +



Subscribe to Spaceflight Now Plus for access to our extensive video collections!
How do I sign up?
Video archive

STS-120 day 2 highlights

Flight Day 2 of Discovery's mission focused on heat shield inspections. This movie shows the day's highlights.

 Play

STS-120 day 1 highlights

The highlights from shuttle Discovery's launch day are packaged into this movie.

 Play

STS-118: Highlights

The STS-118 crew, including Barbara Morgan, narrates its mission highlights film and answers questions in this post-flight presentation.

 Full presentation
 Mission film

STS-120: Rollout to pad

Space shuttle Discovery rolls out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and travels to launch pad 39A for its STS-120 mission.

 Play

Dawn leaves Earth

NASA's Dawn space probe launches aboard a Delta 2-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral to explore two worlds in the asteroid belt.

 Full coverage

Dawn: Launch preview

These briefings preview the launch and science objectives of NASA's Dawn asteroid orbiter.

 Launch | Science

Become a subscriber
More video



Four-way cosmic pile up

BY DR EMILY BALDWIN

ASTRONOMY NOW

Posted: 16 April, 2009

Combining images from space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have revealed the first cosmic collision of four separate galaxy clusters.

The image was acquired using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, allowing astronomers to determine the three-dimensional geometry and motion of the galaxies in the system MACSJ0717.5+3745 (or MACSJ0717 for short). The resulting image captured a messy four-way pile up resulting from a 13 million light year long stream of galaxies and dark matter pouring into a region already containing a significant number of galactic inhabitants.

This composite image shows the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717 where four separate galaxy clusters have been involved in a collision. Hot gas is shown in an image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and galaxies are shown in an optical image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The hot gas is colour-coded to show temperature, where the coolest gas is reddish purple, the hottest gas is blue, and the temperatures in between are purple. Image: NASA, ESA, CXC, C. Ma, H. Ebeling, and E. Barrett (University of Hawaii/IfA), et al., and STScI.

Lead author of the study Cheng-Jiun Ma of the University of Hawaii comments that the system also displays a remarkably hot temperature. “Since each of these collisions releases energy in the form of heat, MACSJ0717 has one of the highest temperatures ever seen in such a system.”

Previous images had already revealed the presence of the filament, but this is the first time that evidence holding it responsible for the mayhem has been brought to light. And the evidence is strong. First, the motion of gas and galaxy clusters matched the direction and orientation of the filament, and second, the largest hot region in MACSJ0717 is where the filament intersects the cluster, suggesting ongoing impacts.

“MACSJ0717 shows how giant galaxy clusters interact with their environment on scales of many millions of light years,” says team member Harald Ebeling. “This is a wonderful system for studying how clusters grow as material falls into them along filaments.”

The observations match well to computer models that show that massive galaxy clusters should grow in regions where large-scale filaments of intergalactic gas, galaxies, and dark matter intersect, and where material falls inward along the filaments. But there is still a lot to learn, and Ma and his team hope to use even deeper X-ray data to measure the temperature of the gas over the full 13 million light year extent of the filament, to see how its infall may heat the gas in clusters over large scales.

“This is the most spectacular and most disturbed cluster I have ever seen,” says Ma, “and we think that we can learn a whole lot more from it about how structure in our Universe grows and evolves.”

MACS J0717 is located 5.4 billion light years from Earth.