Monster "El Gordo" Galaxy Cluster is Bigger Than Thought please log in to view this image This is a composite image of X-rays from Chandra and optical data from Hubble of the galaxy cluster ACT-CL J0102-4915, located about 7 billion light years from Earth. This cluster has been nicknamed "El Gordo" (or, "the fat one" in Spanish) because of its gigantic mass. Scientists first announced the discovery of El Gordo with Chandra and ground-based optical telescopes in 2012. They determined that El Gordo is the most massive, the hottest, and gives off the most X-rays of any known galaxy cluster at its distance or beyond. New data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests El Gordo weighs as much as 3 million billion times the mass of our Sun. This is about 43 percent higher than the original estimate based on the X-ray data and dynamical studies. The new Hubble study determined that most of the mass is hidden away as dark matter. The location of the dark matter is mapped out in this composite in blue. Because dark matter doesn't emit any radiation, astronomers instead precisely measure how its gravity warps the images of far background galaxies like a funhouse mirror. This allowed them to come up with a mass estimate for the cluster. Chandra's X-ray data are shown in pink and these have been overlaid on optical data from Hubble that shows the individual galaxies in the cluster as well as stars in the field of view. The X-ray image of El Gordo reveals a distinct cometary appearance. Along with the optical data, this shows that El Gordo is, in fact, the site of two galaxy clusters running into one another at several million miles per hour. This and other characteristics make El Gordo akin to the well-known object called theBullet Cluster, which is located almost 4 billion light years closer to Earth. As with the Bullet Cluster, there is evidence that normal matter, mainly composed of hot, X-ray bright gas, has been wrenched apart from the dark matter in El Gordo. The hot gas in each cluster was slowed down by the collision, but the dark matter was not. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (Univ. of California, Davis), J. Hughes (Rutgers Univ.), F. Menanteau (Rutgers Univ. & Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), C. Sifon (Leiden Obs.), R. Mandelbum (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), L. Barrientos (Univ. Catolica de Chile), and K. Ng (Univ. of California, Davis)
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned A sun that is the source of all our power The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour Of the galaxy we call the 'milky way' Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars It's a hundred thousand light years side to side It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point We go 'round every two hundred million years And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth ----------- Makes you feel quite insignificant doesn't it?
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