Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Galactic Cluster Suggests Hidden Superstructure

Posted by timothy on from the mommy-that-cloud-looks-like-a-hidden-superstructure dept.

joncrie writes "The nearby galaxy cluster Fornax is facing an intergalactic headwind as it is pulled by an underlying superstructure of dark matter, according to new evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Astronomers think most of the matter in the universe is concentrated in long large filaments of dark matter and that galaxy clusters are formed where these filaments intersect."

3 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. More information from article. by Silverlancer · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Fast Facts from the article for those interested:

    Fast Facts for Fornax Cluster:
    Credit NASA/CXC/Columbia U./C.Scharf et al.
    Scale Image is 47 arcmin across
    Coordinates (J2000) RA 03h 38m 24.30s | Dec -35 27' 04.80"
    Observation Time 5 days, 18 hours
    Distance Estimate About 65 million light years

  2. Re:Just one question... by gothzilla · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Fornax is facing an intergalactic headwind as it is pulled by an underlying superstructure of dark matter"

    It's not being pulled by a headwind. It's facing a headwind.

  3. Re:Filament = lensing? by TMB · · Score: 4, Informative
    I haven't heard of any lensing based on filament structures, but the folks who do what is called "weak lensing" might have some statistical arguments that can correlate their results with the likely (or unlikely) presence of filaments.
    Yes, this is quite measurable. For example, see "A Measurement of Weak Lensing by Large-Scale Structure in Red-Sequence Cluster Survey Fields", Hoekstra et al. 2002, ApJ, 572, 55

    [TMB]