TELESCOPES COMBINE TO PUSH FRONTIER ON GALAXY CLUTERS

Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, NRAO/AUI/NSF, STScI, R. van Weeren (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and G. Ogrean (Stanford University)

Hubble News

Located about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, MACS J0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster.

MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known, is the site of a collision between four clusters. It is located about 5.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

These new images of MACS J0416 and MACS J0717 contain data from three different telescopes: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (diffuse emission in blue), Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, and blue), and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (diffuse emission in pink).

Where the X-ray and radio emission overlap the image appears purple. Astronomers also used data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India in studying the properties of MACS J0416.

The Chandra data shows gas in the merging clusters with temperatures of millions of degrees. The optical data shows galaxies in the clusters and other, more distant, galaxies lying behind the clusters. Some of these background galaxies are highly distorted because of gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive objects. This effect can also magnify the light from these objects, enabling astronomers to study background galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to detect. Finally, the structures in the radio data trace enormous shock waves and turbulence. The shocks are similar to sonic booms, generated by the mergers of the clusters.

For more information about these new images, visit: (HubbleSite) (Chandra)

Comments

A METHOD TO TEST THE EXISTENCE OF REGULAR BLACK HOLES

Illustration of a black hole. Image Credit & Copyright: Alain Riazuelo The existence of the singularity is an intrinsic problem of the General Relativity (GR). At the fundamentally level, the resolution of the problem of the singularity lies with the expectation that under situations where quantum effects become strong, the behavior of gravity could possibly greatly deviate from that predicted by the classical theory of GR. Regular black hole solution are proposed with the same spacetime geometry outside the horizon as the traditional black hole, but bears no singularity inside. Whether or not black hole singularities should exist, they would be covered by the black hole horizon. The black hole horizon serves as an information curtain hindering outside observers from directly observing the interior structure of the black hole, and determining that whether or not the black hole singularity does really exist. A method is needed to check the correctness of the new constructions ...

Dark Neutron Stars

Illustration of a neutron star. Credit: NASA/Dana Berry There is good evidence that electron-positron pair formation is not present in that section of the pulsar open magnetosphere which is the source of coherent radio emission, but the possibility of two-photon pair creation in an outer gap remains. Calculation of transition rates for this process based on measured whole-surface temperatures, combined with a survey of gamma-ray, X-ray and optical luminosities, expressed per primary beam lepton, shows that few Fermi LAT pulsars have significant outer-gap pair creation. For radio-loud pulsars with positive polar-cap corotational charge density and an ion-proton plasma there must be an outward flow of electrons from some other part of the magnetosphere to maintain a constant net charge on the star. In the absence of pair creation, it is likely that this current is the source of GeV gamma-emission observed by the Fermi LAT and its origin is in the region of the outer gap. With n...

SUPERNOVAE FROM WD-WD DIRECT COLLISIONS

Image: Supernova remnant N 63A. Credit: NASA/ESA/HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Models for supernovae (SNe) related to thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs (WDs) have been extensively studied over the last few decades, mostly focusing on single degenerate (accretion of material of a WD) and double degenerate (WD-WD merger) scenarios.

SpaceTime

Search This Blog