Photo of the day: merging galaxies quartet
In the Image of the Week heading on the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a beautiful snapshot of the galaxy cluster Abell 3827 has been released.
Clusters of galaxies are gravitationally coupled galaxy systems, some of the largest structures in the universe. It spans tens of millions of light-years across.
In the central part of the presented image, you can see four merging galaxies. The bluish halo around this quartet is a gravitationally lensed image of a much more distant galaxy behind the cluster.
To obtain the presented image, two instruments aboard the Hubble were used. These are the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), capable of capturing data in the visible, near-infrared, near, and mid-ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
” Observations of four merging galaxies indicate that dark matter around one of these galaxies does not move with this galaxy, which may indicate the presence of interactions of unknown nature with the participation of dark matter,” notes the European Southern Observatory (ESO, European Southern Observatory).
