Thursday, September 22, 2011

Space Thursday ( boy I hope this works)

I hope all the goodies on here work as I had to copy this from it's site. All the sites that have share icons never have Multiply, things I have never heard of, but never Multiply. Time to speak to them about that.

Enjoy

 

 

 

News Release Number: STScI-2011-17

Pandora's Cluster – Clash of the Titans

June 22, 2011: A team of scientists studying the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, have pieced together the cluster's complex and violent history using telescopes in space and on the ground, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the Japanese Subaru telescope, and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The giant galaxy cluster appears to be the result of a simultaneous pile-up of at least four separate, smaller galaxy clusters that took place over a span of 350 million years. The galaxies in the cluster make up less than five percent of its mass. The gas (around 20 percent) is so hot that it shines only in X-rays (colored red in this image). The image is a composite of separate exposures made by Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys detectors in October 2009, the VLT, and the Chandra ACIS detector. Hubble provides the central, most detailed part of the image, while the VLT, which has a wider field of view, provides the outer parts of the image. The distribution of invisible dark matter (making up around 75 percent of the cluster's mass) is colored here in blue.

See the rest:

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Merten (Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics

3 comments:

  1. oh WOW! this is really neat. thanks, Susan.

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  2. 'The distribution of invisible dark matter (making up around 75 percent of the cluster's mass) is colored here in blue'

    Thanks for posting , but how did they know where to colour the picture blue, if dark matter is invisible and to my knowledge undetectable ?

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  3. Good question. I vaguely remember from some show I watched that somehow they can sort this out, but for the life of me I don't remember how.

    ReplyDelete