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Massive merger of galaxies is the most powerful on record

23 September 2004

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The event details what the scientists are calling the perfect cosmic storm: galaxy clusters that collided like two high-pressure weather fronts and created hurricane-like conditions, tossing galaxies far from their paths and churning shock waves of 100-million-degree gas through intergalactic space. The tiny dots in this artist's concept are galaxies containing thousand million of stars.

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Credits: NASA

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This map shows "surface brightness" or how luminous the region is. The larger of the two galaxy clusters is brighter, shown here as a white and red spot. A second cluster resides about "2 o'clock" from this, shown by a batch of yellow surrounded by green. Luminosity is related to density, so the densest regions (cluster cores) are the brightest regions. The white color corresponds to regions of the highest surface brightness, followed by red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.

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High resolution version (TIFF format) 525 Kb

Credits: ESA/ XMM-Newton/ Patrick Henry et al.

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This image shows the temperature of gas in and around the two merging galaxy clusters, based directly on X-ray data. The galaxies themselves are difficult to identify; the image highlights the hot ‘invisible’ gas between the clusters heated by shock waves. The white colour corresponds to regions of the highest temperature - million of degrees, hotter than the surface of the Sun - followed by red, orange, yellow and blue.

High resolution version (JPG format) 57 Kb

High resolution version (TIFF format) 819 Kb

Credits: ESA/ XMM-Newton/ Patrick Henry et al.

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ESA Space Science XMM-Newton