chandra_809 April 3rd, 2014
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)
When scientists first discovered this galaxy cluster in 2012 with Chandra and ground-based optical telescopes, they nicknamed it "El Gordo" (the "fat one" in Spanish) because of its gigantic mass. New data from Hubble suggest it may weigh 43 percent more - about 3 million billion Suns -- than the original estimate based on the X-ray data and dynamical studies. This composite image of El Gordo contains X-rays from Chandra (pink), a map of where the dark matter is found determined by gravitational lensing (blue), and the individual galaxies in the cluster and stars in the field of view as observed by Hubble.
Provider: Chandra X-ray Observatory
Image Source: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2014/elgordo/
Curator: Chandra X-ray Observatory, Cambridge, MA, USA
Image Use Policy: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/image_use.html
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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