ZwCl 7160 (2014)

Turns out there are an awful lot of galaxy clusters out there. This one seems quite a bit farther away but it seems rather interesting. I notice that the lensing looks visually centered around largest galaxy in the cluster which I guess makes sense but usually there are other masses around making the lens more difficult to interpret. (I should pay more attention to how often this happens. Maybe this is actually quite normal.)

There are also some interesting tendrils which seem to point to or emanate from the core of this galaxy. I’ve had a hard time figuring out what’s going on. Most of the citations for this cluster are radio studies. This of course has me thinking about black holes. Well, whatever.

There is also an object of unknown nature in the picture, which I will NOT annotate because this new Flickr interface won’t let me (grr!). Honestly, it just looks like a couple of interacting background galaxies to me, but when you spot something labelled “object of unknown nature” it’s hard to help letting your imagination run.

Red: HST_9292_08_ACS_WFC_F850LP_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_9292_08_ACS_WFC_F775W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 50° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.