Astronomers have noticed two large galaxies locked in a cosmic tug-of-war 700 million light-years from Earth — and for the primary time in such a close-by galaxy, watched as a faint stream of stars is being pulled from one into the opposite.
The observations, made within the galaxy cluster Abell 3667, revealed a faint, million light-year-long bridge of stars connecting its two brightest galaxies. Astronomers say the cluster is definitely the results of two smaller clusters that started merging a few billion years in the past, every with its personal dominant central galaxy. As these giants — and their satellite tv for pc galaxies — proceed to merge, the bridge of stars between them provides uncommon insights into the clusters’ historical past and the highly effective gravitational forces at play.
“That is the primary time a function of this scale and dimension has been present in an area galaxy cluster,” Anthony Englert, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown College in Rhode Island, who led a brand new paper describing the observations, stated in a assertion. “It was an enormous shock that we had been in a position to picture such a faint function.”
The bridge is product of intracluster mild, or ICL, a diffuse glow from stars which have been stripped from their dwelling galaxies by intense gravitational forces. Englert and his group had been in a position to detect this dim bridge by stacking 28 hours of observations taken over a number of years utilizing the Darkish Vitality Digicam on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
“It was only a blissful coincidence that so many individuals had imaged Abell 3667 through the years, and we had been in a position to stack all of these observations collectively,” Englert stated within the assertion.
On the high of the bridge lies the lenticular (disc-shaped) galaxy IC 4965, together with a small group of galaxies which are nonetheless falling into the cluster. On the backside of it’s JO171, a placing “jellyfish galaxy” named for the lengthy tendrils of fuel trailing from one facet. Because it merges into Abell 3667, JO171 is being stripped of fuel, shutting down star formation in a part of its ring-like construction, in line with the assertion.
Past its visible magnificence, the sunshine bridge additionally supplies a beneficial probe of darkish matter, the invisible substance believed to make up roughly 80% of the universe’s mass. As a result of intracluster mild tends to hint the identical paths as darkish matter, it provides an oblique strategy to map its distribution, astronomers say.
“The distribution of this mild ought to mirror the distribution of darkish matter, so it supplies an oblique strategy to ‘see’ the darkish matter,” examine co-author Ian Dell’Antonio of Brown College stated within the assertion.
The examine additionally highlights the sort of discoveries which are anticipated to quickly grow to be routine with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to start full operations later this 12 months or in early 2026. Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Area and Time (LSST) will map the southern sky in unprecedented element over a 10-year interval utilizing the world’s largest digital digicam, bringing to mild galaxy clusters like Abell 3667.
“What we did is only a small sliver of what Rubin goes to have the ability to do,” Englert stated within the assertion. “It is actually going to blow the examine of the ICL extensive open.”
This analysis is described in a paper revealed Aug. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal.
