Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Jullo (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), P. Natarajan (Yale University), and J.-P. Kneib (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, CNRS, France); Acknowledgment: H. Ford and N. Benetiz (Johns Hopkins University), and T. Broadhurst (Tel Aviv University)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory have combined efforts to produce a dark matter map of the inner region of Abell 1689, an immense cluster of galaxies located 2.2 billion light-years away. Dark matter in the cluster is mapped by plotting the plethora of arcs produced by the light from background galaxies that is warped by the foreground cluster's gravitational field. Dark matter cannot be photographed, but its distribution is shown in the blue overlay. The dark matter concentration and distribution is then used to better understand the nature of dark energy, a pressure that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2010/news-2010-26

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://hubblesite.org/copyright/