(ORDO NEWS) — Using the Indian spacecraft AstroSat, astronomers have explored the center of the Coma Berenices cluster.
About 321 million light-years away, the Coma Cluster (also known as Abell 1656) is one of the richest and most well-studied galaxy clusters.
It contains over 1000 galaxies, and at its center are two supergiant elliptical galaxies NGC 4874 and NGC 4889.
To shed more light on the properties of this cluster, a team of astronomers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, India, observed it using AstroSat.
Scientists used the UVIT (Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) telescope to study the central region of the cluster in the far ultraviolet range.
First of all, the team studied the resulting UVIT image of the central region of the cluster and found more than 1300 sources.
It was noted that 852 of these sources were identified as galaxies, 114 as stars, and 3 of them as quasars. The nature of the remaining sources is yet to be determined.
It turned out that many of the discovered galaxies show unconventional morphology in the far ultraviolet range.
For example, the galaxy GMP 2910, which exhibits an impressive narrow tail, was thought to have been formed by a dwarf galaxy or gas cloud that was destroyed due to depressurization within the cluster or tidal forces.
Astronomers speculate that the springs, which exhibit distorted morphology, have recently become part of the Coma Cluster and are being destroyed by environmental mechanisms in the cluster.
The scientists added that, to their knowledge, their study is the first study of a galaxy cluster region that has been conducted using UVIT data.
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