Friday, April 25, 2014

APOD 4.5

The image below depicts the galaxy cluster, El Gordo (literally translated to The Fat One) aka ACT-CL J0102-4915. This is the largest distant galaxy cluster to ever have been discovered and observed. It is located approximately 7 billion light-years from Earth. It was found by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This cluster is the most massive (has the mass of a million billion Suns) and hottest and gives off the most X-rays of any known cluster at this distance and beyond. This cluster is  composed of two separate galaxy subclusters that are currently colliding at several million kilometers per hour. The pinkish hue in the image is the hot gas and a computer generated map shows the most probably distribution of dark matter in blue. This distribution was calculated using the gravitational lens distortions of background galaxies. 

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