Clusters within clusters

This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope ’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), reveals thousands of globular clusters lying at the core of a galaxy cluster . It was created by a Hubble survey that drew on data from three of the telescope’s separate observing programmes to explore the centre of the Coma cluster , a huge gathering of over 1000 galaxies, about 320 million light-years away, all bound together by gravity.

Astronomers spotted over 22 000 globular clusters, some of which had formed a bridge connecting a pair of well-known interacting galaxies ( NGC 4889 and NGC 4874 ). A globular cluster is a spherical group of stars that usually orbits a galaxy as a self-contained satellite. However, the globular clusters studied here are of a different type, intracluster globular clusters. Specifically, these are globular clusters that are not bound to an individual galaxy, but to a galaxy cluster — in this case, Coma.

While globular clusters orbiting our Milky Way reveal themselves as sparkling spherical assemblies of densely packed stars , at the distance of the Comla cluster, they only appear as tiny dots of light, even to Hubble's advanced vision. However, a characteristic feature of globular clusters is their colour; since the stars in any given cluster all formed at around the same time and from the same “stuff”, they usually have a consistent colour. In this way, the astronomers were able to identify the clusters — and rule out background galaxies lying in the same region of sky — by analysing their colour and size, painting a beautiful family portrait of Coma and its clusters.

With the help of the identified globular clusters astronomers can map the distribution of matter and — even more important — of dark matter in the Coma cluster. The Coma Cluster was one of the first places where observed gravitational anomalies indicated the existence of dark matter.