Centaurus Cluster of Galaxies:
Vast Hot Gas Plume May Be A Passing Attraction
The Chandra image of the Centaurus
galaxy cluster shows a long plume-like feature
resembling a twisted sheet. The plume is some
70,000 light years in length and has a temperature of
about 10 million degrees Celsius. It is several million
degrees cooler than the hot gas around it, as seen in
this temperature-coded image in which the sequence red,
yellow, green, blue indicates increasing gas
temperatures. The cluster is about 170 million light
years from Earth.
The plume contains a mass comparable to 1 billion
suns. It may have formed by gas cooling from the
cluster onto the moving target of the central galaxy,
as seen by Chandra in the Abell 1795 cluster. Other
possibilities are that the plume consists of debris
stripped from a galaxy which fell into the cluster, or
that it is gas pushed out of the center of the cluster
by explosive activity in the central galaxy. A problem
with these ideas is that the plume has the same
concentration of heavy elements such as oxygen,
silicon, and iron as the surrounding hot gas.
| Fast Facts for Centaurus
Cluster: |
| Credit |
NASA/IoA/J.Sanders & A.Fabian
|
| Scale
|
Image is 3 arcmin on a side.
|
| Category |
Groups
& Clusters of Galaxies |
| Coordinates
(J2000) |
RA 12h 48m 48.7s | Dec -41º
18' 44" |
| Constellation
|
Centaurus |
| Observation
Date |
May 22, 2000 |
| Observation
Time |
8.9 hours |
| Obs. ID
|
504 |
| Color Code
|
Temperature |
| Instrument
|
ACIS |
| Distance Estimate
|
About 170 million light years |
|
Release Date
|
January 29, 2002
|
|
|
