Bridge between galaxy clusters in Abell 2384 – optical view

An optical view of the Abell 2384 system, comprising two galaxy clusters located 1.2 billion light years from Earth, based on data from the Digitized Sky Survey.

The two clusters, comprising each many galaxies, vast amounts of hot gas even larger amounts of unseen dark matter, are visible as the slight overdensities of galaxies – the faint points of light – just above and below the image centre. Some foreground stars from our Milky Way galaxy are also visible, scattered across the image.

The clusters are linked by a three million light-year long bridge of hot gas that shines brightly in X-rays, which has been observed with ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray observatories (not visible in this image). A new study based on multi-wavelength analysis of this system reveals the effects of a jet, observed in radio waves, shooting away from a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy in one of the clusters.

More information: A bent bridge between two galaxy clusters