Chandra celebrated New Year with the Champagne Swarm

Ring in the New Year with the “Champagne Cluster,” a cluster of galaxies seen here in this new composite image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes.

Astronomers discovered this peculiar cluster of galaxies on December 31, 2020.

The date, combined with the galaxies’ bubble-like appearance and superheated gas seen in Chandra observations (shown in purple), inspired scientists to dub the object the Champagne Swarma name much easier to remember than its official name RM J130558.9+263048.4.

The new composite image taken by NASA’s observatory shows that the Champagne Swarm is actually two galaxy clusters in the process of fusion to form an even larger swarm.

O superheated gas in galaxy clusters it normally takes on an approximately circular or moderately oval shape in images, but in the Champagne cluster it is more spread from top to bottomrevealing the presence of the two colliding swarms.

Two individual galaxy clusters that make up the colliding clusters can be seen at the top and bottom of the center. The image was round 90° clockwise, so that north points to the right.

The ultrahot gas exceeds the combined mass of all of the more than one hundred individual galaxies in the newly formed cluster. Swarms also contain even larger amounts of invisible dark matterl, the mysterious substance that permeates the Universe.

In addition to the Chandra data, this new image contains optical data from the Legacy Surveys (red, green and blue), which consists of three individual, complementary surveys from multiple telescopes in the US state of Arizona and Chile.

The Champagne Swarm is member of a rare class of merging swarmswhich includes the well-known Bullet Swarmwhere the hot gas in each cluster collided and slowed down, with a clear separation between the hot gas and the most massive galaxy in each cluster.

By comparing the data with computer simulations, astronomers came to two possibilities for the story of the Champagne Swarm.

One of them is that the two swarms have already collided with each other for more than two billion years. After the collision, the two traveled outside and were then pulled back towards each other by gravity, now heading towards a second collision.

The other idea is that thethere was a single collision about 400 million years ago and the two clusters are now moving away from each other after that collision.

Researchers think further study of the Champagne Cluster could potentially teach them how dark matter reacts to a high-speed collision.

The scientist who describes these results was recently published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal.