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HSC J023336-053022, a huge cluster of galaxies located about 4 billion light years from Earth, is heating the material within it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, more than 25 times hotter than the Sun’s core.
This composite image shows the galaxy cluster HSC J023336-053022, also known as ACT-CL J0233.6-0530 or XLSSC 105. Image credit: Green Bank Observatory / National Science Foundation / Subaru Telescope / National Astronomical Observatory of Japan / HSC -SSP Collaboration / ESA / XMM-Newton / XXL Survey Consortium.
Galactic clusters contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes.
Typically, they have a mass of about one million trillion times the mass of the Sun and form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together.
Several subgroups of galaxies can also form within a single cluster, as in the case of HSC J023336-053022.
Two blue-violet circles in the composite image above mark the positions of two sub-clusters within HSC J023336-053022 that are slowly approaching and colliding with each other, “shock heating” of the gas to intense temperatures in the process .
To create this image, three different international teams of astronomers explored observations of the cluster across the electromagnetic spectrum in order to isolate and identify different aspects of this region of space.
These aspects are shown here in different colors:
(i) individual galaxies within the cluster are displayed in orange;
(ii) dark matter, which maps the position of the two sub-clusters, in blue;
(iii) hot, dense gas is presented in green, while hot, thin, high-pressure gas is presented in red; this gas is something known as an “intracluster medium”, which permeates clusters of galaxies and fills the space between galaxies.
The addition of radio observations makes this image of HSC J023336-053022 special, as many collision studies within or between galaxy clusters have not captured this shock-warming process – which is visually represented in the region where green becomes red – in the radio.
This process releases immense amounts of energy and heats the already boiling gas to temperatures tens of times warmer.
Before the shock warming, the gas is about 40 million degrees Celsius, already about 2.7 times hotter than the Sun’s core.
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