Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, is a giant
galaxy cluster
A galaxy cluster, or a cluster of galaxies, is a structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are bound together by gravity, with typical masses ranging from 1014 to 1015 solar masses. They are the second-lar ...
resulting from the simultaneous pile-up of at least four separate, smaller galaxy clusters that took place over a span of 350 million years, and is located approximately 4 billion light years from Earth.
The
galaxies in the cluster make up less than five percent of its mass.
The gas (around 20 percent) is so hot that it shines only in
X-rays
An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nbs ...
.
Dark matter
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter is called "dark" because it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not a ...
makes up around 75 percent of the cluster's mass.
This cluster also shows a
radio halo
Radio halos are large-scale sources of diffuse radio emission found in the center of some, but not all, galaxy clusters.Feretti, L., and G. Swarup. "The Universe at Low Radio Frequencies." Proceedings of IAU Symposium. Vol. 199. 2002. There are t ...
along with several other
Abell clusters. It has a strong central halo, along with an extended tail, which could either be relic radiation, or an extension of the central halo.
Renato Dupke, a member of the team that discovered the Cluster, explained the origin of the name in an interview: "We nicknamed it ‘''Pandora's Cluster''’ because so many different and strange phenomena were unleashed by the collision."
Gallery
File:Swimming in Sculptor.jpg, Abell 2744 parallel field observed as part of the Frontier Fields programme.
File:Hubble sees ghost light from dead galaxies in galaxy cluster Abell 2744.jpg, The galaxies that are not coloured blue are either in the foreground or background and are not part of the cluster.galaxy cluster
A galaxy cluster, or a cluster of galaxies, is a structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are bound together by gravity, with typical masses ranging from 1014 to 1015 solar masses. They are the second-lar ...
- Hubble Frontier Fields view (7 January 2014).galaxy cluster
A galaxy cluster, or a cluster of galaxies, is a structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are bound together by gravity, with typical masses ranging from 1014 to 1015 solar masses. They are the second-lar ...
- extremely distant galaxies revealed by gravitational lensing
A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant light source and an observer that is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels toward the observer. This effect is known ...
(16 October 2014).
See also
*
Abell 370
Abell 370 is a galaxy cluster located nearly 5 billion light-years away from the Earth (at redshift ''z'' = 0.375), in the constellation Cetus. Its core is made up of several hundred galaxies. It was catalogued by George Abell, and is the most ...
*
Abell catalogue
The Abell catalog of rich clusters of galaxies is an all-sky catalog of 4,073 rich galaxy clusters of nominal redshift ''z'' ≤ 0.2. This catalog supplements a revision of George O. Abell's original "Northern Survey" of 1958, wh ...
*
List of Abell clusters
The Abell catalogue is a catalogue of approximately 4,000 galaxy clusters with at least 30 members, almost complete to a redshift of ''z'' = 0.2. It was originally compiled by the American astronomer George O. Abell in 1958 using plates from PO ...
*
X-ray Astronomy
References
External links
Image in the visible spectra -Hubble spacetelescope(Lars Holm Nielsen et al)retrieved 20/09/2011
Video simulation of the merging events that created Abell 2744- Hubble space telescope (Lars Holm Nielsen et al)retrieved 20/09/2011
2744
Sculptor (constellation)
Abell richness class 3
Galaxy clusters
{{galaxy-cluster-stub