Chandra Release - January 29, 2002

Visual Description: Centaurus Cluster

An X-ray image of the Centaurus Cluster, a galaxy cluster located in the constellation Centaurus, is shown here.The Centaurus Cluster is composed of thousands of galaxies, which are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction.  The image features a blue and green curved and nebulous structure with bright orange and yellow spots at the core. The curved feature is long and plume-like, resembling a twisted sheet. The plume is some 70,000 light years in length and has a temperature of about 10 million degrees Celsius. This is several million degrees cooler than the hot gas around it, as seen in this temperature-coded image in which the red, yellow, green, blue indicates increasing gas temperatures. The cluster is about 170 million light years from Earth. The plume contains a mass comparable to 1 billion suns. It may have formed by gas cooling from the cluster onto the moving target of the central galaxy.