Galaxy Cluster Leaving Trail Of Hot Gas In Its Wake After Eating Its Neighbor

Space.com

The Chandra X-ray Observatory view of galaxy group NGC 4839 has revealed that it is "plunging into the Coma galaxy cluster and leaving behind an extraordinary tail of superheated gas," according to NASA.   Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart

Transcript

00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe.

00:05NGC 4839

00:09A group of galaxies is plunging into the Coma Galaxy Cluster

00:14and leaving behind an extraordinary tail of superheated gas.

00:18Astronomers have confirmed this is the longest known tail behind a galaxy group

00:23and used it to gain a deeper understanding of how galaxies cluster

00:27some of the largest structures in the universe grow to their enormous sizes.

00:32Astronomers trained NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on the galaxy group NGC 4839.

00:40Galaxy groups are collections of about 50 galaxies or less that are bound together by gravity.

00:47Galaxy clusters are even larger and can contain hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies.

00:54Both galaxy clusters and galaxy groups are enveloped by huge amounts of hot gas

01:00that are best studied using X-rays.

01:03These superheated pools of gas, though extremely thin and diffuse,

01:07represent a significant portion of the mass in galaxy groups or clusters

01:12and are crucial for understanding these systems.

01:16NGC 4839 is located near the edge of the Coma Galaxy Cluster,

01:21one of the largest known clusters in the universe, about 340 million light-years away.

01:26As NGC 4839 moves toward the center of the Coma Cluster,

01:31the hot gas in the galaxy group is stripped away by its collision with gas in the cluster.

01:36This results in a tail forming behind the galaxy group.

01:40This comet-like tail is 1.5 million light-years long,

01:44or hundreds of thousands of times the distance between the Sun and the nearest star,

01:49making it the longest tail ever seen trailing behind a group of galaxies.

01:54This gas is a key ingredient in making future generations of stars and planets.

01:59The current brightness of the tail gives astronomers a special chance to study the tail's gas

02:05before it mixes in with the hot gas in the cluster and becomes too faint to study.

02:10The gas in the tail behind NGC 4839 will ultimately merge

02:15with the large amount of hot gas already present in the Coma Cluster.

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