Center of the Coma cluster explored with AstroSat

Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.

Analyzing the central field of the Coma cluster has been done using India's AstroSat satellite. The results of the study were published on arXiv.org.

There are thousands of galaxy bound together by gravity. They are the largest known structures in the universe and could be great laboratories for studying the evolution of the universe.

The Coma cluster is one of the most studied and richest clusters of galaxies in the nearby universe. The central region is dominated by two supergiant elliptical galaxies.

Smriti Mahajan is an astronomer at the Indian Institute for Science Education and Research in Mohali, India. The central region of the Coma cluster was studied using the UVIT.

The data taken by the UVIT aboard the multi-wavelength satellite mission AstroSat was used to analyse the far ultraviolet emission sources in the central region.

The team looked at UVIT's deep far ultraviolet image of the Coma cluster's central field and found more than 1300 sources. One of the quasars is the farthest object seen by the UVIT so far. The nature of the remaining sources isn't known.

Most of the stars identified with UVIT are part of the Coma cluster. The GMP 2910 is assumed to have been formed by a dwarf galaxy or gas cloud that was disrupted due to ram-pressure stripping.

The sources identified by UVIT may have recently entered the Coma cluster and are undergoing stripping events under the influence of the cluster-related environmental mechanisms according to the astronomer.

The authors of the paper said that all the distorted sources were likely to fall into the cluster recently.

The UVIT data is being used to investigate a galaxy cluster field for the first time.

More information: Smriti Mahajan et al, Deepest far ultraviolet view of a central field in the Coma cluster by AstroSat UVIT. arXiv:2209.05886v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2209.05886

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