This scene of cosmic chaos shows part of the massive Perseus galaxy cluster, revealing several giant elliptical galaxies, a dusty spiral with fading arms, and several edge-on galaxies. Some appear to have experienced interactions or mergers with neighboring galaxies.
And this is only a fraction of the 240 to 250 million galaxy clusters that exist. light years from earth Contains thousands of galaxies.
Giants photographed by the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii elliptical galaxy NGC 1270 is in the center of the image. galaxy I gave up the ghost a long time ago when it came to creating new things. star;All that currently exists in NGC 1270 are old, cold, red stars, giving the elliptical galaxy its unique color. Lurking at the center is an active supermassive black holeup to 12 billion times our mass solar.
NGC 1270 is one of the most massive galaxies on Earth. perseus star clusterbut it doesn’t exactly match the height of the other person elliptical galaxy NGC 1275, which lies outside the field of view in this north cluster image, is what is called the Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG). It’s a true giant at the center of the Perseus Cluster, and it’s still growing, with 13 billion solar masses of hydrogen gas raining down from the entire cluster environment. In fact, computer simulations show that up to 70% of the mass of BCG (and similar clusters in all clusters) gets caught up in the cluster’s gravitational web and falls towards the center of the cluster, where the material it accretes It has been suggested that it originates from. B.C.G.
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NGC 1275 is located at the center of mass of the star cluster. It is the center around which all this galactic chaos unfolds. Around it is a faint halo of diffuse light produced by stars torn from galaxies that fall into galaxy clusters with gravitational currents washing over the environment. It’s not just individual stars that are stripped away. of european space agency‘s euclid spaceship recently detected 70,000 floating globular clusters Within 1.6 million light years of the center of the cluster.
This diffuse halo of light is called intracluster light (ICL). Although the ICL and BCG have somewhat similar origins, they are unrelated in that most of their mass comes from material torn from other galaxies that fell into the cluster. The center of the ICL is approximately 200,000 light-years offset from the center of NGC 1275, meaning that the BCG and ICL are separate but overlapping. ICL stars travel different paths to NGC 1275 stars and contain different amounts of heavy elements. Dwarf galaxies were thought to be the source of stars that collectively produce ICLs, but they are too few in number. dwarf galaxy The Perseus star cluster (Euclidean counted about 1,100 of them) explains the brightness and range of the ICL. Rather, the source may be a slightly more massive galaxy.
The Perseus Cluster is not simply filled with light within the cluster. There is also something called the intracluster medium, which is a swamp of diffuse gas through which the galaxies in the cluster must travel. As galaxies move through this intracluster medium, the pressure of collisions with the gas acts to remove all the molecular hydrogen that forms stars. spiral galaxy This leaves behind, like the dusty spiral you see on the far left of this image, where all the star-forming gas is gone and new stars can no longer be formed, and old stars die and their interiors are spewed out. , the galaxy becomes clogged. A block with interstellar dust.
The material within the cluster is hot enough to exceed 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), so it emits intensely in X-rays. NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory They observed bubbles being blown into this X-ray background by an explosion from a supermassive mass of 800 million solar masses. black hole The bubbles generate large-amplitude ripples that reverberate in the intracluster medium. Although not literally audible, scientists have converted these pressure waves into sound waves, resulting in one of the deepest sounds ever heard, 57 octaves below the middle keys of a piano. I discovered that. Virgo Cluster bubbles produce an even deeper sound, 59 octaves below.
Perseus star cluster with a total mass of 665 trillion times mass of our sunone of the most massive galaxy clusters nearby. It is part of the Perseus-Pisces supercluster, which is made up of three separate galaxy clusters, and there are an estimated 10 million superclusters in the visible universe. Galaxy clusters and superclusters form at nodes in the vast, expanding cosmic web of matter. universe.
This cosmic web was created in the aftermath of the macrocosm. big bangwhen the ripples in the ocean of plasma that filled the universe 379,000 years after the Big Bang froze in place. The ripples were located in slightly denser areas, so gravityand above time They attract matter, and today their ripples form the filaments of the cosmic web, which is largely made up of. dark matter. In fact, when you look at a galaxy cluster, even X-rays can’t see much of the mass. About 85% of each galaxy cluster is invisible. dark matter. By looking for where the gravitational force of dark matter is generated, we can infer its existence. gravity lens.
Nevertheless, the 15% we can see is amazing, full of color, action, and chaos, as represented by the northern image of Gemini.
