#coma galaxy cluster

[astronerdscorner]

Deep look into the past

This picture of the constellation of Coma Berenices isnt very spectacular on first glance. But within this constellation lays the Coma galaxy cluster, a group of 1000 Galaxies each with millions .... billions of own stars.

Most of those galaxies are roughly 300 Million lightyears away ... a distance hard to process for the human mind.

In the second picture each galaxy visible is marked in red or blue depending on the catalog it registered in. Who wanna count them? Who wanna guess on how many civilization we are looking at?

Bilddaten:

- RGB 63 x 300s / Gain 100

- 25 Flat Dark

- 25 Flat Darks

- 25 Darks

Setup:

- Skywatcher 150/750 PDS

- Omegon 571C

- Skywatcher EQ6R Pro

- Zwo Asi 178mm

[stuffmikeclicked]

It occurred to me that since I was last on Tumblr, I got a new astrophotography setup. I've only used it a few times, but most nights I'd rather haul out Lyra the Dob for a quick and easy setup.

The scope part of the new rig arrived the day before I left for a week-long trip to dark skies as a mentor at an astronomy camp. I got the go-ahead to bring it; the seeing was bad all week so the stars were bloated, but I still had a great time.

From that week:

At top left is Messier 109; the bright star is the bottom-left corner of the Big Dipper's cup. I'd chosen it for first light because I'd never imaged it before and it has a beautiful barred spiral structure. In this cropped version you can see the structure and three faint satellite galaxies to the right, running in a row from above the galaxy to just below and right of it.

The one at bottom right is the Coma Galaxy Cluster. The seeing made it hard to tell, but *most* of the points of light in that image are individual galaxies and not stars. I could see a few dozen through my visual scope one night. It was glorious.

[ton-618-ton-618]

2024 March 27

A picture filled with fuzzy yellow spots is presented. All of the yellow spots are galaxies, and most of the galaxies are members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The two bright blue dots are foreground stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

Image Credit & Copyright: Joe Hua

Explanation: Almost every object in the featured photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured here is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other. Most galaxies in Coma and other clusters are ellipticals, while most galaxies outside of clusters are spirals. The nature of Coma's X-ray emission is still being investigated.

[chibinotan]

Lensed Seahorse

[livingforstars]

Thousands of Coma Cluster Galaxies - September 17th, 1995.

"Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of galaxies pictured is a dense cluster containing many thousands of galaxies. Many of these galaxies contain as many stars as our own Milky Way galaxy. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other! This picture was created at the WWW site Skyview, a "virtual observatory" where it is possible to view any part of the sky in wavelengths from radio to gamma-ray."

[whats-in-a-sentence]

During the early 1930s, Fritz Zwicky, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (a famously caustic scientist whose appreciation for symmetry led him to call his colleagues spherical bastards because, he explained, they were bastards any way you looked at them), realized that the outlying galaxies in the Coma cluster, a collection of thousands of galaxies some 370 million light-years from earth, were moving too quickly for their visible matter to muster an adequate gravitational force to keep them tethered to the group.

"The Fabric of the Cosmos" - Brian Greene

[netmassimo]

An image captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) depicts the Coma Cluster, also known as Abell 1656, so named because it's part of the constellation Coma Berenices. DECam was designed to conduct a long-term investigation of dark energy but is also useful for other types of astronomical studies. The Coma Cluster is linked to the study of dark matter since the inconsistency between the estimate of its overall mass and the measurement of its gravitational effects stimulated the research that led to today's dark matter models.

[apod]

2024 May 2

M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy Image Credit & Copyright: Drew Evans

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100, also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right). The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky site near Flagstaff, Arizona, planet Earth, reveals M100's bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Measurements of variable stars in M100 have played an important role in determining the size and age of the Universe.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240502.html

[thefirststarr]

This magnificent spiral galaxy is Messier 64 (M64), often called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy. It’s nickname comes from its dark-lidded appearance in telescopic views. The spiral's central region, about 7,400 light-years across, is pictured in this reprocessed image from the Hubble Space Telescope. M64 lies some 17 million light-years away in the otherwise well-groomed northern constellation Coma Berenices. The enormous dust clouds partially obscuring M64's central region are filled with young, blue star clusters and the reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star forming regions. But imposing clouds of dust are not this galaxy's only peculiar feature. Observations show that M64 is actually composed of two concentric, counter-rotating systems. While all the stars in M64 rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxy's central region, gas in the outer regions, extending to about 40,000 light-years, rotates in the opposite direction. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation are likely the result of a billion year old merger of two different galaxies.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing: Jonathan Lodge

[onedappercat]

Why Does the Ortolan Sing?

A human AU Good Omens fanfic

(View uncensored art on AO3)

Chapter 20: So Much For Stardust

Rating: Explicit

Summary:

Following his mother’s death, Azira sets out to prepare his family’s bookshop for reopening. While appreciating the shop’s new sign, he hears the beckon of a siren’s song sounding from the coffee shop over the road. He succumbs to temptation to find the source of the hypnotic voice is an auburn-haired songbird. Intrigued by the singer’s beauty and haunted by his apparent loneliness, Azira is determined to introduce himself. There’s only one problem: the musician’s menacing, jealous, and possessive partner.

CW: Domestic abuse, loss of a loved one, adultery, toxic relationship, murder, blood, organized crime

Excerpt from chapter 20:

“Space is incredible, you know?” Crowley’s smile broadened as he stared up at God’s canvas. “It’s true eternity. So vast and limitless, we’re constantly finding something new. Even when Earth is long gone, the space we used to occupy will receive the light from star systems we’ve never known, never named, and the light from Earth will do the same. We’re fleeting, but space isn’t.”

“That’s beautiful…” Azira sighed. “And slightly tragic. Nothing lasts forever, I suppose.”

“Some things do.” Crowley took a deep breath of the fresh, country air. “Humans give names and stories to the stars, and I wonder who else out there, seeing the same stars from a different angle, have done the same. Like over there,” Crowley motioned to a cluster of stars Azira couldn’t differentiate from any others. “Coma Berenices. Humans looked at those stars and saw the hair of an Egyptian queen, sacrificed to Aphrodite to ensure her husband’s return from battle. Something so human. Or the Andromeda Galaxy… one of our neighbors. Named for a beauty whose parents angered the Gods, causing her to be sacrificed to a monster. The stories we assign them won’t last for eternity, but their light always reaches somewhere, even once they’re gone. And there’s an infinite number of them to do just that.”

“When you put it like that, eternity is… a hard concept to grasp.” Azira pondered for a moment. He’d had philosophical conversations with his parents, but eternity was never a topic they touched on. “I admit, my mind usually stays grounded in the stories in books; I don’t tend to consider just how insignificant that all is.”

Crowley eyed Azira at askance, then rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his hand and smiling. “Eternity is a mountain made of diamonds.”

“A what?” Azira grinned.

“There’s a mountain made of diamonds, a hundred miles wide and a hundred miles high, and every thousand years a bird comes and sharpens its beak on the mountain.”

“The same bird?”

Crowley waved his hand dismissively. “We’re talking diamond mountains; you want to harp on the age of the bird?”

“Right,” Azira chuckled. “Carry on.”

“So this bird sharpens its beak on the mountain, scraping away a tiny piece every time. Once that mountain has completely worn away, one second of eternity has passed.”

Azira stared up at Crowley, his face framed in the falling stars and glittering diamonds of eternity, sending their light to Earth. His lips parted, a soft gasp leaving him as he took in the eternal beauty, incomparable in his mind to the fleeting beauty that was Crowley. Crowley’s soft smile and gentle eyes were gazing at him with the kind of love actors attempt to portray in movies. It was so believable, as he watched the old black-and-whites with his mother, until he witnessed it himself.

“Make love to me under the stars,” Azira whispered. “Eternally.”

Continue from chapter 20 here.

Thank you so much to everyone at @goodomensafterdark for your help and putting up with my millions of questions! 🥰

[world-beauty]

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

Credits: U. Toronto, Kitt Peak National Obs.

[stellanix]

went out with my telescope tonight and got pictures of the black eye galaxy and the ring nebula :3

the black eye galaxy is a spiral galaxy about 17 million light years away, with an inner disk dense with dark dust that gives it its name

the ring nebula is a planetary nebula about 2500 light years away. planetary nebulae form when a red giant star at the end of its life sheds its outer layers into space, leaving a roughly spherical nebula with the star's remnant core as a tiny white dwarf in the center. our sun will share a similar fate billions of years from now

these two pictures kinda illustrate an interesting thing - the density of stars in them are drastically different. the black eye galaxy is located near the north galactic pole in the constellation coma berenices, so when you look towards it, you're looking "up" out of our galaxy. there's not too many stars in the way. this gives us a clear view of distant galaxies, and is why coma berenices and other nearby constellations (like canes venatici, ursa major, leo, and virgo) have soooooo many visible galaxies. the ring nebula on the other hand is located close to the galactic plane, which is very dense with stars. that plus the vast dust clouds in the galactic disk obscure our view of distant galaxies. instead we see things like star clusters and nebulae

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Dark Energy Camera probes the Coma Cluster, an inspiration for the theory of dark matter

The Dark Energy Camera has captured an image of the dazzling Coma Cluster, named after the hair of Queen Berenice II of Egypt. Not only significant in Greek mythology, this collection of galaxies was also fundamental to the discovery of the existence of dark matter.

The theory emerged in 1937 when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that the Coma Cluster galaxies behaved as if they were under the influence of vast amounts of unobservable "dark" matter.

This densely populated image showcases an enormous cluster not of individual stars, but of entire galaxies, known as the Coma Cluster. The Coma Cluster is named for the constellation in which it lies, Coma Berenices. It is the only one of the 88 IAU constellations to be named after a historical figure. Its namesake is Queen Berenice II of Egypt, or more precisely her hair, with "coma" meaning "hair of the head" in Latin.

Berenice famously cut her hair off and presented it as a votive offering to the gods when her husband returned safely from war. The hair was placed in a temple, but went missing soon after. The court astronomer, Conon of Samos, claimed to identify Berenice's lost tresses in a rather unlikely spot—the night sky—suggesting that the goddess Aphrodite had catasterized (literally turned into a constellation) the queen's locks. This all took place around 245 BCE, meaning that Berenice's hair has enjoyed celestial recognition for an extraordinarily long time.

The data used to build this detailed picture were collected by the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.

The 570-megapixel camera was built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey (DES)—an amazing 758-night run of observations between 2013 and 2019. DES was conducted with the intention to better understand the nature of dark energy—the unknown entity that is causing the expansion of our universe to accelerate.

The Coma Cluster is closely associated with dark energy's equally mysterious counterpart: dark matter. Nearly a century ago, in 1937, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed several galaxies within the Coma Cluster. He calculated an approximation of the cluster's mass based on its luminous—in other words, observable—structures.

But he encountered something strange: the cluster seemed to be missing mass. In fact, the galaxies within the cluster were behaving as though the cluster contained 400 times more mass than his estimates suggested.

Zwicky reached this conclusion by observing how fast the galaxies within the cluster were moving. To explain this further, it is helpful to briefly revisit a key point about the nature of gravity. Gravity is one of the four known fundamental interactions that exist between all entities with energy or mass. The more mass that an object has, the stronger the gravitational pull it will exert. Therefore, less massive objects that are within a certain distance to a more massive object will be pulled uncontrollably towards it.

However, there is an additional factor to consider: velocity. If an object is moving fast enough, it can escape the gravitational pull of other objects. It is this principle that enabled Zwicky to infer that the Coma Cluster appeared to be "missing" matter.

He found that the galaxies were moving so fast that they should be escaping the cluster if it were being held together only by the observable mass. This led him to postulate that the cluster must be held together by vast amounts of unobservable "dark" matter, though this suggestion seemed far-fetched to much of the astronomical community.

It took until the 1980s for the majority of astronomers to be convinced of the existence of dark matter. The consensus moved as several studies came out reporting the same curious mass inconsistency that Zwicky observed, but on the scale of single galaxies rather than entire galaxy clusters.

One such study was done in 1970 by U.S. astronomers Kent Ford and Vera C. Rubin, who found evidence of invisible matter in the Andromeda Galaxy. And in 1979, astronomers Sandra Faber and John Gallagher performed a robust analysis of the mass-to-light ratio for over 50 spiral and elliptical galaxies, which led them to conclude that, "the case for invisible mass in the universe is very strong and getting stronger."

The existence of dark matter and dark energy is now widely accepted, and understanding their elusive nature is a main focus of modern astrophysics. A deeper understanding may be on the horizon with the upcoming 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will be conducted by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the inspirational female astronomer who helped show the world that there is so much more to the universe than meets the eye.

[uncontrolledfission]

The search for dark matter

Post #6 on Physics and Astronomy, 06/10/23

Welcome back. 

This time, I’m going to be talking about how astronomers and physicists have made an effort to detect and provide evidence for the existence of dark matter. 

To recap from my first issue, it’s worth talking about what dark matter actually is. It’s a type of matter estimated to make up about 80% of the Universe’s matter. To date, it hasn’t been detected. Light passes straight through, it is assumed, however we infer the existence of such a substance due to its gravitational influence. 

We can take an example from the Bullet Cluster. This is a pair of galaxy clusters that collided head-on a while ago. That pink mist you see in the photo is hot gas, and within it most of the regular matter. The blue mist, on the other hand, is dark matter, and where most of the mass of these two galaxies were in this photo. 

Vera Rubin and Kent Ford

Vera Rubin and Kent Ford were two astronomers who had worked together to observe the Andromeda Galaxy, more specifically the rotational velocities of concentric regions from the center. The prediction was that, the further you looked from the center, the less the velocity of the stars within that region, since a greater centripetal force would be required to maintain a high-velocity orbit. This, however, was not the case. 

It was observed that the velocity remained nearly constant the further you went out. Wait a minute, though, this didn’t make sense–that velocity was high enough, in theory, to make the stars fly off into space. But they weren’t.

These findings matched those of Fritz Zwicky. He was a Swiss astronomer who had studied the Coma galaxy cluster. He made the same observation–the speeds were so high that the stars should just have been flung off into space. His findings, however, were ignored.

Experiments to detect dark matter

So far, experiments to detect dark matter have been largely unsuccessful. Some of these include PICASSO, LUX-ZEPLIN, EURECA, FUNK, KIMS, DarkSide, Edelweiss, DARWIN, and DAMA/LIBRA, which is what I’m exploring next. 

This detector in particular, introduced promising results which ended up the subject of dispute. DAMA/LIBRA, which hoped to capture activity from WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), returned a signal with a period of one year. This looked to be one step closer to affirming dark matter’s existence–however, COSINE-100, an experiment set up to mirror that of DAMA/LIBRA, could not reach those same results, which led to the belief that the signal detected could be from some other factor.

The search for dark matter is one that interests me very much. It’s like telling someone in the Stone Age that metal exists, and they should go find it. Except, dark matter is seemingly even more impossible to find, since we can’t perceive it, with the human eye or the best of our current technology. Which, I guess you could argue, would be exactly how the Stone Age person would have felt, but you understand my point.

That said, it’s something I’m eagerly watching. The day we find something promising? You’ll hear it first from me.

[silvereyedowl]

[source]

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies - November 5th, 1996.

"Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of galaxies pictured is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies house billions of stars - just like our own Milky Way galaxy. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other! Most galaxies in Coma and other clusters are ellipticals, while most galaxies outside of clusters are spirals."

[adastra-sf]

Jellyfish Galaxy JW39

Hubble captured this remarkable image of the "Jellyfish Galaxy" (JW39) adrift 900 million lightyears away in the constellation Coma Berenices.⁣ Its nickname comes from the galaxy's trailing tendrils of baby stars.

As the galaxy moves through searing-hot plasma lurking between the larger galaxies in its cluster, the current of that intracluster medium strips away JW39's star-forming gas, so these young solar systems are forming outside the spiral disc.

Imagine the culture that might arise on a world around one of these stars in a billion years, marooned in the black between galaxies, with nights as dark as the bottom of the ocean.