A Tour of Zwicky 8338

Narrator (April Hobart, CXC): An extraordinary ribbon of hot gas trailing behind a galaxy like a tail has been discovered using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This ribbon, or X-ray tail, is likely due to gas stripped from the galaxy as it moves through a vast cloud of hot intergalactic gas. With a length of at least 250,000 light years, it is likely the largest such tail ever detected.

The tail is located in the galaxy cluster Zwicky 8338, which is almost 700 million light years from Earth. The length of the tail is more than twice the diameter of the entire Milky Way galaxy and contains gas with temperatures of about 10 million degrees.

Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity. They consist of hundreds, or even thousands, of galaxies, enormous pools of hot gas, and vast amounts of unseen dark matter. Since galaxy clusters are so enormous, they play a critical role inunderstanding how our Universe evolves. X-ray tails like the one in Zwicky 8338 show how the galaxies within a cluster can transform over time. This gives scientists important information in understanding these critical cosmic systems.