The 1.5-million-light-year-long gas trail was caused by a group of galaxies moving 3 million miles per hour
Like comets and cats, clusters of galaxies sometimes have long tails. Recently, astronomers have found that those tails can span staggering distances, with one newly discovered tail stretching more than a million light-years long — or longer than 10 Milky Way galaxies lined up side to side.
The discovery began when a team of scientists pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at a cluster of galaxies — around 50 galaxies bound together by gravity — called NGC 4839. This group is merging with the much larger Coma Cluster, a dense stellar formation some 340 million light-years from Earth, which contains over 1,000 tightly-bunched galaxies. Researchers tracked NGC 4839 as it moved through the Coma Cluster, leaving a streak of bright, hot gas in its wake — a"tail".
Using this data, the research team calculated NGC 4839's speed. They found that the runaway galaxy group is traveling at approximately 3 million mph . Its trail showed a mild amount of turbulence, indicating that the galaxy group is not conducting a lot of heat. And at some point in its travels, it released an enormous shock wave.
A paper describing the results is set to publish in the June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A preprint of the study is currently available on arXiv.org.
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