![]() The views provided by space telescopes are helping researchers deduce how galaxy clusters evolve. Clusters such as this one likely formed in unusually dense patches of dark matter, gas and dust in the early universe. Most of the cluster-a staggering 85 percent-consists of dark matter, an invisible substance perceptible only by its gravitational pull. From the images, scientists have learned that the cluster is anchored in a sea of hot gas, and that stars make up just one to two percent of its mass. The discovery of this object pushes back the formation time of galaxy clusters the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity by about 700 million years. Because the cluster is so distant, we see it as it was when the universe was about 3.8 billion years old, just a quarter of its current age. The galaxy cluster is called CL J1001+0220 (CL J1001 for short) and is located about 11.1 billion light years from Earth. Since its discovery in 2012, NASA observatories have imaged the cluster in visible, infrared and X-ray light. But 10 billion light-years away, a massive cluster called IDCS J1426.5+3508 boasts roughly one to two thousand galaxies-a vast city compared to our galactic neighborhood. Nature has provided an immensely varied array of galaxies, ranging from faint, diffuse dwarf objects to brilliant spiral-shaped giants. Many such assemblages are so enormous that they contain hundreds of billions of stars. Our Milky Way galaxy resides in a modest bundle of about 50 galaxies, collectively known as the Local Group. galaxy, any of the systems of stars and interstellar matter that make up the universe. Over time, individual galaxies assembled into sizable groups, which scientists refer to as galaxy clusters. The hope is the experiment series will reveal more about the. This image is populated with a serene collection of elliptical and. While they have no sharply defined edges, they generally extend a few tens of millions of light-years across. A massive galaxy cluster in the constellation Cetus dominates the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The first galaxies emerged a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang. An Earthbound experiment is replicating the extreme heat found in galaxy clusters located in deep space using nearly 200 lasers. Clusters of galaxies are massive but also relatively compact.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |