Latest Galaxy groups and clusters Stories

ESA ESA’s Planck space telescope has made the first conclusive detection of a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across 10 million light-years of intergalactic space. Planck’s primary task is to capture the most ancient light of the cosmos, the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. As this faint light traverses the Universe, it encounters different types of structure including galaxies and galaxy clusters – assemblies of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A giant filament of dark matter extends 60 million light-years from one of the most massive galaxy clusters known. Leftover from the very first moments after the Big Bang, the filament is part of the cosmic web that constitutes the structure of the Universe. Scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have studied this filament in 3D for the first time and conclude that if the filament is representative of the rest of the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For the first time, scientists have detected part of the invisible dark matter skeleton of the universe, where over half of all matter is believed to reside. The discovery confirms a key prediction in the theory of how the universe's current web-like structure came to be. The map of the known universe shows that most galaxies are organized into clusters, but some are situated along filaments that connect to the clusters....

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Astronomers were able to beat the odds by observing gravitational lensing taking place at 10 billion light-years away from Earth. Gravitational lensing is the bending of light from a distant galaxy, and it has never been observed behind a cluster at this range before. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the cluster's powerful gravity. Astronomers reported in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical...

More atomic hydrogen gas — the ultimate fuel for stars — is lurking in today’s Universe than we thought, CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun has found. This is the first accurate measurement of this gas in galaxies close to our own. Just after the Big Bang the Universe’s matter was almost entirely hydrogen atoms. Over time this gas of atoms came together and generated galaxies, stars and planets — and the process is still going on. Astronomers want to understand where, when and...

Using a combination of powerful observatories in space and on the ground, astronomers have observed a violent collision between two galaxy clusters in which so-called normal matter has been wrenched apart from dark matter through a violent collision between two galaxy clusters. The newly discovered galaxy cluster is called DLSCL J0916.2+2951. It is similar to the Bullet Cluster, the first system in which the separation of dark and normal matter was observed, but with some important...

The first observation of a cosmic effect theorized 40 years ago could provide astronomers with a more precise tool for understanding the forces behind the universe's formation and growth, including the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter. A large research team from two major astronomy surveys reports in a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters that scientists detected the movement of distant galaxy clusters via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect,...

Thanks to the presence of a natural “zoom lens” in space, University of Chicago scientists working with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have obtained a uniquely close-up look at the brightest gravitationally magnified galaxy yet discovered. The imagery offers a visually striking example of gravitational lensing, in which one massive object’s gravitational field can magnify and distort the light coming from another object behind it. Such optical tricks stem from Einstein’s theory of...

Astronomers have found a cluster of stars that they say survived a massacre 13 billion years ago. The team used computer simulations to look at how the compact groups of stars surrounding our Milky Way galaxy were formed. There are about 200 compact groups sitting close to our galaxy, each containing up to a million stars. The researchers ran simulations of isolated and colliding galaxies, in which they included a model for formation and destruction of stellar clusters. Once a...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An exceptional galaxy cluster, the largest seen in the distant universe, has been found using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation-funded Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Officially known as ACT-CL J0102-4915, the galaxy cluster has been nicknamed "El Gordo" ("the big one" or "the fat one" in Spanish) by the researchers who...