The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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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