Astronomers Capture Images of Colliding Galaxies
Posted by Kiran | Under Nature, Science Saturday Aug 30, 2008
Recently astronomers have captured images of galaxies involved in a megalithic collision through Chandra’s X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. In fact it was a cluster of galaxies named MACSJ0025.4-1222 which is 5.7 billion light years away.
The collision has given researchers insight into the separation of dark matter and ordinary matter.
“Dark matter makes up five times more matter in the universe than ordinary matter,” said Marusa Bradac of the University of California Santa Barbara, who led the work.
“This study confirms that we are dealing with a very different kind of matter, unlike anything that we are made of. And we’re able to study it in a very powerful collision of two clusters of galaxies,” Bradac said in a statement.
Dark matter is not visible, however it does have a mass and therefore, a gravitational pull. It was also observed that as the galaxies collided at speeds of millions of miles per hour, the hot gas (ordinary matter) in each cluster slowed down, but the dark matter did not.
Scientists are hoping that this behavior will shed light into the more complex properties of dark matter which is five times more abundant in our universe than ordinary matter.
