Chandra Release - April 8, 2020

Visual Description: Isotropic Universe

This graphic contains a map of the full sky and highlights four of the hundreds of galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe bound by gravity and astronomers can use them to measure important cosmological properties. The sky map in this schematic is in "galactic coordinates," with the plane of the Milky Way running along the middle (instead of the equator like is used for Earth). Galactic longitude runs in the horizontal, or "x" direction, and galactic latitude runs in the vertical, or "y" direction. The dark points show the location in the sky map of 313 galaxy clusters observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton and included in a study. The four Chandra images of galaxy clusters from the study are shown as pull-outs in each corner colored as purple-pink blobs, in a clockwise direction from the top left, Abell 2199, RXCJ1504.1-0248, Abell 3667 and Abell 85.