With Halloween coming up, the Hubble Space Telescope team is celebrating by releasing a new Hubble image showing the dark cobwebs of galaxy cluster Abell 611.
With Halloween coming up tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope team is celebrating by releasing a new Hubble image showing the dark cobwebs of galaxy cluster Abell 611. Located an incredible 3.2 billion light-years away, this view shows hundreds of galaxies that are bound together by gravity into one enormous structure.
This particular cluster is a favorite target for astronomers in their search to understand a spooky substance: dark matter. A big question in cosmology is why large structures like Abell 611 don’t fly apart, as they don’t seem to contain enough mass to hold themselves together with gravity. The leading explanation is that they do in fact contain much more mass than we can see, and this hypothetical unseen mass is referred to as dark matter.