Center of the Coma cluster explored with AstroSat

Utilizing India’s AstroSat spacecraft, astronomers have investigated a central subject of a cluster of galaxies referred to as the Coma cluster. Outcomes of the examine, introduced in a paper revealed September 13 on arXiv.org, ship vital insights into the properties and nature of this galaxy cluster.

Galaxy clusters comprise as much as 1000’s of galaxies sure collectively by gravity. They’re the most important recognized gravitationally sure constructions within the universe, and will function glorious laboratories for finding out galaxy evolution and cosmology.

At a distance of about 321 million light years, the Coma cluster (also referred to as Abell 1656) is without doubt one of the richest and essentially the most well-studied clusters of galaxies within the close by universe. It incorporates greater than 1,000 galaxies and its central area is dominated by two supergiant elliptical galaxies, specifically: NGC 4874 and NGC 4889.

With a purpose to shed extra gentle on the properties of this cluster, a group of astronomers led by Smriti Mahajan of the Indian Institute for Science Training and Analysis in Mohali, India, has noticed it with AstroSat. For this function, they used primarily the satellite’s Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) to carry out far ultraviolet examine of the central area of the Coma cluster.

“We current evaluation of the far ultraviolet (FUV) emission of sources within the central area of the Coma cluster (z = 0.023) utilizing the information taken by the UVIT aboard the multi-wavelength satellite mission AstroSat,” the researchers wrote within the paper.

Initially, the group examined UVIT’s deep far ultraviolet picture of the Coma cluster’s central subject (a area with a radius of roughly 2.3 million gentle years from the cluster’s core) and detected greater than 1,300 sources. It was famous that 852 of those sources had been recognized as galaxies, 114 as stars, and three of them as quasars (considered one of them is the farthest object noticed by the UVIT up to now). The character of the remaining sources is but to be decided.

The examine discovered that a lot of the brightest galaxies recognized with UVIT are members of the Coma cluster. Furthermore, it turned out that most of the 852 galaxies showcase an unconventional morphology in far ultraviolet. As an example, the galaxy designated GMP 2910, which displays a spectacular slim tail, assumed to be fashioned by a dwarf galaxy or gasoline cloud that was disrupted as a result of ram-pressure stripping by the intracluster medium, or tidal forces.

The astronomers suppose that basically the sources recognized by UVIT that showcase a distorted morphology, could have lately entered the Coma cluster, and due to this fact are present process stripping occasions underneath the affect of the cluster-related environmental mechanisms.

“All of the distorted sources are more likely to have fallen into the cluster lately, and therefore haven’t virialized but,” the authors of the paper defined.

They added that to the most effective of their data, their examine is the primary investigation of a galaxy cluster subject being carried out with the UVIT information.

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