Hubble Captures Enormous Galaxy Cluster 7 Billion Light-Years Away

A gorgeous photo by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows ACT-CLJ0102-4915, the largest, hottest, and X-ray brightest galaxy cluster ever discovered in the distant Universe.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows ACT-CLJ0102-4915. Massive galaxy clusters such as ACT-CLJ0102-4915 are useful tools for studying very distant objects, because this lens-like behavior amplifies the light from faraway galaxies in the background. They also contribute to a range of topics in cosmology, as the precise nature of the lensed images encapsulates information about the properties of spacetime, the expansion of the cosmos and the distribution of dark matter within the cluster. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / RELICS.

ACT-CLJ0102-4915 is located approximately 7.2 billion light-years from Earth.

This galaxy cluster is almost as massive as 3 million billion Suns — so it’s little wonder that it has earned the nickname of ‘El Gordo’ (‘the Fat One’ in Spanish).

In 2012, observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope showed that ACT-CLJ0102-4915 is actually composed of two galaxy clusters colliding at millions of miles per hour.

The formation of galaxy clusters depends heavily on dark matter and dark energy; studying such clusters can therefore help shed light on these elusive phenomena.

In 2014, Hubble found that most of ACT-CLJ0102-4915’s mass is concealed in the form of dark matter.

Evidence suggests that ACT-CLJ0102-4915’s ‘normal’ matter — largely composed of hot gas that is bright in the X-ray wavelength domain — is being torn from the dark matter in the collision.

The hot gas is slowing down, while the dark matter is not.

This spectacular scene was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments as part of an extensive observing program called Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).

RELICS imaged 41 giant galaxy clusters over the course of 390 Hubble orbits and 100 Spitzer Space Telescope observing hours, aiming to find the brightest distant galaxies.

Studying these galaxies in more detail with both current telescopes and the future NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully tell us more about our cosmic origins.

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