* Astronomy

A team of astronomers led by Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel has published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky, encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion light-years deep into space, equivalent to 40 percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang.

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Taking advantage of the high sensitivity of ESA's XMM-Newton and the sharp vision of NASA's Chandra X-Ray space observatories, astronomers have studied the behaviour of massive fossil galaxy clusters, trying to find out how they find the time to form…

Many galaxies reside in galaxy groups, where they experience close encounters with their neighbours and interact gravitationally with the dark matter - mass which permeates the whole intergalactic space but is not directly visible because it doesn’t emit radiation.
These interactions cause large galaxies to spiral slowly towards the centre of the group, where they can merge to form a single giant central galaxy, which progressively swallows all its neighbours.
If this process runs to completion, and no new galaxies fall into the group, then the result is an object dubbed a 'fossil group', in which almost all the stars are collected into a single giant galaxy, which sits at the centre of a group-sized dark matter halo. The presence of this halo can be inferred from the presence of extensive hot gas, which fills the gravitational potential wells of many groups and emits X-rays.
A group of international astronomers studied in detail the physical features of the most massive and hot known fossil group, with the main aim to solve a puzzle and understand the formation of massive fossils. In fact, according to simple theoretical models, they simply could not have formed in the time available to them!


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The fossil group investigated, called 'RX J1416.4+2315', is dominated by a single elliptical galaxy located one and a half thousand million light years away from us, and it is 500 thousand million times more luminous than the Sun.
The XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray observations, combined with optical and infrared analyses, revealed that group sits within a hot gas halo extending over three million light years and heated to a temperature of 50 million degrees, mainly due to shock heating as a result of gravitational collapse.

Such a high temperature, about as twice as the previously estimated values, is usually characteristic of galaxy clusters. Another interesting feature of the whole cluster system is its large mass, reaching over 300 trillion solar masses. Only about two percent of it in the form of stars in galaxies, and 15 percent in the form of hot gas emitting X-rays. The major contributor to the mass of the system is the invisible dark matter, which gravitationally binds the other components.
According to calculations, a fossil cluster as massive as RX J1416.4+2315 would have not had the time to form during the whole age of the universe. The key process in the formation of such fossil groups is the process known as 'dynamical friction', whereby a large galaxy loses its orbital energy to the surrounding dark matter. This process is less effective when galaxies are moving more quickly, which they do in massive 'clusters' of galaxies.
This, in principle, sets an upper limit to the size and mass of fossil groups. The exact limits are, however, still unknown since the geometry and mass distribution of groups may differ from that assumed in simple theoretical models.

"Simple models to describe the dynamical friction assume that the merging galaxies move along circular orbits around the centre of the cluster mass. Instead, if we assume that galaxies fall towards the centre of the developing cluster in an asymmetric way, such as along a filament, the dynamic friction and so the cluster formation process may occur in a shorter time scale. Such a hypothesis is supported by the highly elongated X-ray emission we observed in RX J1416.4+2315, to sustain the idea of a collapse along a dominant filament" - Habib Khosroshahi, University of Birmingham (UK), first author of the results.

The optical brightness of the central dominant galaxy in this fossil is similar to that of brightest galaxies in large clusters (called 'BCGs'). According to the astronomers, this implies that such galaxies could have originated in fossil groups around which the cluster builds up later. This offers an alternative mechanism for the formation of BCGs compared to the existing scenarios in which BCGs form within clusters during or after the cluster collapse.

"The study of massive fossil groups such as RX J1416.4+2315 is important to test our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe. Cosmological simulations are underway which attempt to reproduce the properties we observe, in order to understand how these extreme systems develop" - Habib Khosroshahi.

A Gemini/HST survey reveals building-block process in evolution of massive galaxy clusters

A study of the Universe’s most massive galaxy clusters has shown that mergers play a vital role in their evolution.

Astronomers at Oxford University and the Gemini Observatory used a combination of data from the twin Gemini Telescopes, located in Hawaii and Chile, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to study populations of stars in the Universe’s most massive galaxy clusters over a range of epochs – the earliest being half the age of the Universe. The HST images were used to map the light distribution of the galaxies in the cluster. Data from the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph allowed the team to analyse the light from galaxies to determine their masses, ages and chemical compositions.

"We still don’t have a clear picture of how galaxies develop over the history of the Universe. The strength of this study is that we are able to look at galaxy clusters over a range of epochs" - Dr Jordi Barr of Oxford University, who is presenting some of the first results of the Gemini/HST Galaxy Cluster Project at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting on 5th April.

Galaxy clusters contain the most massive galaxies in the Universe. Until recently, astronomers believed that all galaxies in the centres of clusters formed rapidly and then aged without any further changes to their structure in a process known as “Passive Evolution”. Results from the Gemini/HST Galaxy Cluster Project now show that this cannot be the case.

"When we’re looking at the most distant galaxy clusters, we are looking back in time to clusters that are in early stages of their formation. The young galaxies in distant clusters appear to be very different from those in the mature clusters that we see in the local Universe. We found the earliest galaxy clusters have a huge variation in the abundances of elements such as oxygen and magnesium, whereas the chemistry of galaxies in the sample of closer clusters appears to be much more homogenous. This difference in chemistry proves that the clusters must actively change over time. If the galaxies in the old clusters have acquired a complete ‘set’ of elements, it’s most likely that they have formed from the mergers of several young galaxies" - Dr Jordi Barr.


Hubble Space Telescope image of Abell 1689, one of the galaxy clusters used in the sample for the study.
Image credit: NASA

The group found that the star-formation in galaxies is dependent on mass and that in lower mass galaxies star-formation continues for longer. The most massive galaxies in clusters appear to have formed all their stars by the time the universe is just over a billion years old, whereas the lower mass galaxies finish forming their stars some 4 billion years later.

"We see the effects of star-formation in low mass galaxies but are unsure about why it’s happening. It’s possible that star-formation can be shut down very rapidly in dense environments and that the lower mass galaxies are recent arrivals that are forming stars over a longer period outside the cluster, then falling in. But we are still speculating..." - Dr Jordi Barr.

The group’s observations of merging galaxy clusters showed that a large proportion of the galaxies in those clusters have undergone recent bursts of star formation. This indicates that star formation may be triggered if galaxies are thrown, during the course of a merger, into contact with the gaseous medium pervading the cluster.

Future observations are planned at X-ray wavelengths to study the interactions between galaxies and the distribution and temperature of the surrounding gas.

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Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have conducted a cosmic safari to seek out a rare galactic species. Their specimens -- clusters of galaxies in the very distant universe -- are few and far between, and have hardly ever been detected beyond a distance of 7 billion light-years from Earth.

To find the clusters, the team carefully sifted through Spitzer infrared pictures and ground-based catalogues; estimated rough distances based on the cluster galaxies' colours; and verified suspicions using a spectrograph instrument at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Ultimately, the expedition resulted in quite a galactic catch -- the most distant galaxy cluster ever seen, located 9 billion light-years away. This means the cluster lived in an era when the universe was a mere 4.5 billion years old. The universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years old.

"Detecting a galaxy cluster 9 billion light-years away is very exciting. It's really amazing that Spitzer's 85-centimeter telescope can see 9 billion years back in time" - Dr. Peter Eisenhardt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the study's lead investigator.


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ISCS J143809+341419
Position (J2000): RA: 14:38:09 Dec: +34:14:19
Some of the oldest galaxy clusters in the universe pose for Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera. The green blobs are Milky Way stars along the line of sight.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S.A. Stanford (UC Davis/LLNL)

Using the same methods, the astronomers also found three other clusters living between 7 and 9 billion light-years away.

"Spitzer is an excellent instrument for detecting very distant galaxy clusters because they stand out so brightly in the infrared. You can think of these distant galaxy cluster surveys as a game of 'Where's Waldo?' With an optical telescope you can spot 'Waldo,' or the distant galaxy clusters, by carefully searching for them amongst a sea of faint galaxies. But in the Spitzer data, it's as though Waldo is wearing a bright neon hat and can be easily picked out of the crowd" - Dr. Mark Brodwin, co-investigator, also of JPL.

Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. A typical cluster can contain thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. Because of their huge size and mass, they are relatively rare. For example, if Earth were to represent the entire universe, then countries would be the equivalent of galaxies, and continents would be the galaxy clusters.
Galaxy clusters grow like snowballs, picking up new galaxies from gravitational interactions over billions of years. For this reason, team members say these behemoths should be even rarer in the very distant universe.

"The ultimate goal of this research is to find out when the galaxies in this and other distant clusters formed" - Dr. Adam Stanford, University of California at Davis, co-investigator.

Stanford is the lead author of a paper on the most distant galaxy cluster's discovery, which was published in the December 2005 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This is the second time Eisenhardt and Stanford have broken the record for capturing the most distant galaxy cluster. Both say they accidentally broke the record in 1997 when they detected a cluster located 8.7 billion light-years away. The discovery was made by a deep survey of a 0.03-degree patch of sky, or an area significantly smaller than a pea held out at arms length, for 30 nights at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

"We were lucky in 1997 because we weren't looking for galaxy clusters and found the most distant one ever detected in a very small patch of sky. Because galaxy clusters are so massive and rare, you typically need to deeply survey a large area of sky to find them" - Dr. Adam Stanford.

"With Spitzer's great infrared sensitivity we surveyed more deeply in 90 seconds than we could in hours of exposure in the 1997 observations, and we used this advantage to survey a region 300 times larger" - Dr. Peter Eisenhardt.

The 9 billion-year-old cluster is just one of 25 the team captured on their Spitzer safari. They are currently preparing for more observations this spring at the W.M. Keck Observatory to confirm the distance of additional galaxy clusters from their sample. According to Eisenhardt, some of the clusters awaiting confirmation may be even more distant than the current record holder.

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