An accumulation of 270 hours of Chandra observations of the central regions of the Perseus galaxy cluster reveals evidence of the turmoil that has wracked the cluster for hundreds of millions of years. One of the most massive objects in the universe, the cluster contains thousands of galaxies immersed in a vast cloud of multimillion degree gas with the mass equivalent of trillions of suns.
<p>Enormous bright loops, ripples, and jet-like streaks are apparent in the image. The dark blue filaments in the center are likely due to a galaxy that has been torn apart and is falling into NGC 1275, a.k.a. Perseus A, the giant galaxy that lies at the center of the cluster.
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Image is 284 arcsec across. RA 03h 19m 47.60s Dec +41° 30' 37.00" in Perseus. Observation dates: 13 pointings between August 8, 2002 and October 20, 2004. Color code: Energy (Red 0.3-1.2 keV, Green 1.2-2 keV, Blue 2-7 keV). Instrument: ACIS.
NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.
2005-12-01
<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/perseus/">http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/perseus/</a> (<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/perseus/perseus.tif">TIFF source</a>)