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Tour of Frontier Fields
Quicktime MPEG With closed-captions (at YouTube)
Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter. These cosmic giants are not merely novelties of size or girth. Instead, they represent pathways to understanding how our entire universe evolved in the past and where it may be heading in the future.
To learn more about galaxy clusters, including how they grow via collisions, astronomers have collected large quantities of data from some of the world's most powerful telescopes. They have used telescopes that detect different kinds of light to study a half dozen galaxy clusters in depth. The name for this galaxy cluster project is the "Frontier Fields".
Two of these Frontier Fields galaxy clusters, going by their abbreviated names, are MACS J0416 and MACS J0717. Located about 4.3 billion light years from Earth, MACS J0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known, is the site of a collision between four clusters. It is located about 5.4 billion light years away from Earth.
In the new Frontier Fields studies, astronomers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope along with information in radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. They have found new details about both of these complex and colliding systems. Astronomers will continue to analyze the vast amounts of data from the Frontier Fields, which will help them learn more about these gigantic and important objects.
[Runtime: 03:03]
Quicktime MPEG With closed-captions (at YouTube)
Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter. These cosmic giants are not merely novelties of size or girth. Instead, they represent pathways to understanding how our entire universe evolved in the past and where it may be heading in the future.
To learn more about galaxy clusters, including how they grow via collisions, astronomers have collected large quantities of data from some of the world's most powerful telescopes. They have used telescopes that detect different kinds of light to study a half dozen galaxy clusters in depth. The name for this galaxy cluster project is the "Frontier Fields".
Two of these Frontier Fields galaxy clusters, going by their abbreviated names, are MACS J0416 and MACS J0717. Located about 4.3 billion light years from Earth, MACS J0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known, is the site of a collision between four clusters. It is located about 5.4 billion light years away from Earth.
In the new Frontier Fields studies, astronomers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope along with information in radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. They have found new details about both of these complex and colliding systems. Astronomers will continue to analyze the vast amounts of data from the Frontier Fields, which will help them learn more about these gigantic and important objects.
[Runtime: 03:03]
(Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart)
Return to Frontier Fields (March 10, 2016)
Revised: June 09, 2023