Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURAImage processing: R. Colombari, M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) & T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab)

The galaxy cluster Abell 3574 is captured here by the 570-megapixel Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, one of around 40 telescopes at the U.S. National Science Foundation Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.  Located about 200 million light-years away, Abell 3574 is a gravitationally-bound group of hundreds of galaxies. Galaxy clusters are the second-largest-scale structures known in the Universe, but even at their massive scale these galaxies are never all that far from each other. In the top left, the large galaxy IC 4329, surrounded by rings of light, shows evidence of a past cosmic collision. The spread-out fragments of illuminated blue and white gas on the right side of the image are evidence of a similar clash with the galaxy NGC 5291 (yellow color). If you look closely, you can see more evidence of gravitationally interacting galaxies. Do you notice any? The camera that captured this image was specifically designed for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and was operated by the Department of Energy (DOE) and NSF between 2013 and 2019. The purpose of DES was to map out hundreds of millions of galaxies and record their distances to help astronomers understand dark energy. Since the conclusion of DES, the DES data have been made available to the public and the DECam has been available to other researchers on the Blanco telescope.

Provider: NOIRLab

Image Source: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2543a/

Curator: NSF's NOIRLab, Tucson, AZ, USA

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License