Chandra Release - December 4, 2000

Visual Description: Abell 1795

This astronomical image is a Chandra X-ray Observatory view of the galaxy cluster Abell 1795.  The main colors present in the image are red and orange, with a bright light in the center of the image.  Abell 1795 is located approximately 820 million light-years away from Earth.  Like a spoon moving through hot soup, the massive elliptical galaxy near the top of the image has cut a swath across the dense, hot gas in this crowded galaxy cluster. This smoothed X-ray image shows a bright filament some 200,000 light years in length. The gas in this structure is denser and cooler (30 million compared to 50 million degrees) than the surrounding gas. The filament was most likely caused when an enormous elliptical galaxy (white spot at the head of the filament) moved through the cluster core. Hot gas spread throughout the cluster is drawn by the gravitational field of the giant galaxy into a cosmic wake of cooling gas, which appears as the long string-like feature in the middle of this image.