Get ready to marvel at yet another stunning wonder of our universe! The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently released an image of two galaxy clusters running into each other, also known as El Gordo. The image has been shared by the official NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory Instagram page.
The caption under the image shared by Instagram states, “El Gordo is the site of 2 galaxy clusters running into each other at several million miles per hour. The scientists who discovered it nicknamed it "El Gordo" (which means "the fat one" in Spanish) because of its gigantic mass — it weighs as much as 3 million billion times the mass of our Sun!”. The post has already received over 16,000 likes and 50 comments ranging from “awesome”, “so beautiful”, and “wonderful”.
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NASA states that the image shared by NASA Chandra page is a composite image of X-rays from Chandra and optical data from Hubble of the galaxy cluster ACT-CL J0102-4915, located about 7 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists had first announced the discovery of El Gordo using Chandra and ground-based optical telescopes in 2012. They found out that El Gordo is the most massive, the hottest, and gives off the most X-rays of any known galaxy cluster at its distance or beyond.
Moreover, El Gordo’s X-ray image reveals a distinct cometary appearance. It also shows that El Gordo is, in fact, the site of two galaxy clusters running into one another at several million miles per hour. This along with other traits make El Gordo akin to the well-known object called the Bullet Cluster, which is located almost 4 billion light-years closer to Earth.
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