(Austin, TX) An unseen substance violently pulls galaxies through a dense region of space, the “outskirts” of a massive supercluster, scientists announced at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
In a map of the largest area ever imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, dense pools of what’s described as dark matter pull together entire galaxies by the force of gravity. “And as they get pulled together, they get closer to each other, and sometimes we see these violent mergers where they crash into each other,” said astronomer Catherine Heymans of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Heymans and her colleague Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham, U.K. presented findings on one of the largest structures in the universe, supercluster Abell 901/902, which is more than 16 million light-years across and 2.6 billion light-years from Earth. It took more than 80 Hubble images to survey the “rough and tumble” environment of the supercluster, a group of star clusters. A star cluster is a group of galaxies.
“What we’re finding with this survey,” said Heymans, “we can see galaxies changing as we go from the outskirts of the supercluster, like the suburbs of the city, into the center of the city, or the densest parts of the supercluster.”
Heymans added that the first particles of dark matter might be found by the Large Hardron Collider, a colossal atom smasher to be activated late 2008 by the European science group CERN.
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