Using the AstroSat space satellite, astronomers explored the central field of a galaxy cluster.
Galaxy clusters contain up to a thousand galaxies,bound by gravity. They are the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the Universe and serve as excellent laboratories for studying galaxy evolution and cosmology.
Coma Cluster (also known as Abell 1656) -One of the richest and best-studied galaxy clusters in the nearby Universe is located about 321 million light years away. It contains more than 1,000 galaxies, and the central region is dominated by two supergiant elliptical galaxies, namely NGC 4874 and NGC 4889.
To shed more light on the properties of thiscluster, a team of astronomers led by Smriti Mahajan of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, India, observed it using AstroSat. They used a satellite telescope with ultraviolet imaging (Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, UVIT) to study the central region of the Coma cluster in the far ultraviolet spectrum.
To begin with, astronomers studied the imageof the central field of the Coma cluster (a region with a radius of approximately 2.3 million light-years from the cluster core) taken by UVIT and discovered more than 1,300 bright light sources. At the same time, 852 of them were identified as galaxies, 114 as stars and three of them as quasars (one of them is the most distant object observed so far by UVIT). The nature of the remaining sources remains to be determined.
The study showed that the majority of the mostThe bright galaxies identified using UVIT are members of the Coma cluster. Moreover, it turned out that many of the 852 galaxies have unconventional morphology in the far ultraviolet wavelength range. For example, the galaxy GMP 2910 has an impressive narrow tail.
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