An incredible new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the diverse collection of galaxies in RXC J2211.7-0350, a massive galaxy cluster located approximately 3.2 billion light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.
This Hubble image shows the giant galaxy cluster RXC J2211.7-0350. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / RELICS.
Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity. Typically, they have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun.
They form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together.
Their incredible mass makes galaxy clusters very useful natural tools to test theories in astronomy, such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
This tells us that objects with mass warp the fabric of spacetime around them; the more massive the object, the greater the distortion.
An enormous galaxy cluster like RXC J2211.7-0350 therefore has a huge influence on the spacetime around it, even distorting the light from more distant galaxies to change a galaxy’s apparent shape, creating multiple images, and amplifying the galaxy’s light — a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
Galaxy clusters are also cosmic laboratories for studying the relationship between the distributions of dark and visible matter.
According to astrophysicists, about 80-85% of the matter is invisible, the so-called dark matter.
This image of RXC J2211.7-0350 was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) as part of an observing program called Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).
RELICS imaged 41 giant galaxy clusters over the course of 390 Hubble orbits, aiming to find the brightest distant galaxies.
Studying these galaxies in more detail with both current telescopes and the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully tell us more about our cosmic origins.
