Spitzer Nets Thousands of Galaxies in a Giant Cluster

In just a short amount of time, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has bagged more than a thousand previously unknown dwarf galaxies in a giant cluster of galaxies.

Despite their diminutive sizes, dwarf galaxies play a crucial role in cosmic evolution. Astronomers think they were the first galaxies to form, and they provided the building blocks for larger galaxies. They are by far the most numerous galaxies in our Universe, and are an important tracer of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Computer simulations of cosmic evolution suggest that high-density regions of the Universe, such as giant clusters, should contain significantly more dwarf galaxies than astronomers have observed to date.

A team led by Leigh Jenkins and Ann Hornschemeier, both at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., used Spitzer to study the Coma Berenices cluster, an enormous congregation of galaxies 320 million light-years away in the constellation Coma. The cluster contains hundreds of previously known galaxies that span a volume 20 million light-years across.

Jenkins, Hornschemeier, and their collaborators used data from Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to study galaxies at the cluster’s center. They also targeted an outlying region with the goal of comparing the galaxy populations in the different locations to see how environmental variations influence the evolution of galaxies. They stitched together 288 individual Spitzer exposures, each lasting 70 to 90 seconds, into a large mosaic covering 1.3 square degrees of sky.

The team found almost 30,000 objects, whose catalog will be made available to the astronomical
community. Some of these are galaxies in the Coma cluster, but the team realized that a large fraction had to be background galaxies. Using data taken with the 4-meter (13 foot) William Herschel Telescope on the Canary island of La Palma, team member Bahram Mobasher of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, Md., measured distances to hundreds of galaxies in these fields to estimate what fraction are cluster members.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/SDSS

Source: NASA