Contact: Lars Lindberg Christensen
lars@eso.org
49-893-200-6306
ESA/Hubble Information Centre

Hubble Maps Dark Matter Web in a Large Galaxy Cluster

Caption: These images reveal the distribution of dark matter in the supercluster Abell 901/902, composed of hundreds of galaxies. The image in the center shows the entire supercluster. Astronomers assembled this photo by combining a visible-light image of the supercluster taken with the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile, with a dark matter map derived from observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The magenta-tinted clumps represent a map of the dark matter in the cluster. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the Universe's mass. The image shows that the supercluster galaxies lie within the clumps of dark matter.

Credit: Credit for the Hubble images: NASA, ESA, C. Heymans (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), M. Gray (University of Nottingham, U.K.), M. Barden (Innsbruck), and the STAGES collaboration Credit for the ground-based image: ESO, C. Wolf (Oxford University, U.K.), K. Meisenheimer (Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg), and the COMBO-17 collaboration

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