NASA Uncovers Galaxies with Record-Breaking Plunges and Longest-Known Tails
From the smallest human to the largest galaxies, change is a constant. Recently, NASA discovered a cluster of galaxies entering the Coma galaxy cluster, but what makes this discovery significant is that it is leaving behind the longest tail of superheated gas ever observed behind a group of galaxies.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory captured the galaxy cluster NGC 4839. First, learn about a galaxy cluster and not a galaxy cluster. Galaxy clusters are groups of about 50 or fewer galaxies, and galaxy clusters can contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies.
Both are surrounded by vast numbers of superheated gas pools. They make up a significant part of the mass in galaxy groups or clusters.
NGC 4839 is located near the edge of the Coma cluster and is moving toward the center of the Coma cluster. In this process, the hot gas in the cluster is removed by colliding with the gas in the cluster. This results in the formation of a tail behind the galaxy cluster.
The left image shows an X-ray image of the Coma galaxy cluster taken with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton (blue) and optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (yellow). The galaxy cluster NGC 4839 is located in the lower right corner of the image. The image on the right is a Chandra image (purple) of the boxed area. The tip tail of NGC 4839 is located to the left of the Chandra image and contains the brightest galaxy and densest gas in the group. The tail turns to the right.
This tail is actually 1.5 million light-years long, making it the longest tail ever seen behind a cluster of galaxies.
The gas behind NGC 4839 will eventually merge with the large amount of hot gas already in the coma cluster.
Using Chandra data, it was discovered that NGC 4839 is traveling through the galaxy cluster at about 3 million miles per hour.
Researchers looking at previous observations of NGC 4839 have estimated that its tail is at least a million light-years long. The new Chandra data reveal a new record length of 1.5 million light years.
