Thanks to the Chandra space telescope, NASA was able to identify four clusters of galaxies moving towards each other at once. Their collision will create one of the most massive objects in the universe.
This NASA image shows a spectacular and rare phenomenon that depicts one of the largest and most violent collisions in the universe, as detected by the Chandra space agency's X-ray observatory. We are talking about four clusters of galaxies, each of which has a mass of at least several hundred trillion solar masses.
Galactic clusters are the largest structures in the Universe, each of which consists of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. For example, the Milky Way, which is 52,850 light-years across, is part of the Virgo Cluster, which contains about 100 galaxies.
The Virgo Supercluster is 110 million light-years across and contains about 110 billion times more stars than the Milky Way, which contains 100 to 400 billion stars.
Thus, the supercluster resulting from the merger of four galactic clusters will have simply epic proportions, and, according to NASA, it will become one of the most massive objects in the universe:
'New observations show that the megastructure is gathering in a system called Abell 1758, located about 3 billion light-years from Earth. There are two pairs of colliding galaxy clusters moving towards each other. '
Scientists first recognized Abell 1758 as a cluster system of quadruple galaxies in 2004 using data from the Chandra telescope and XMM-Newton, a satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).
'Each pair in the system contains two galaxy clusters that are on their way to merging. In the northern (upper) pair visible in the composite image, the centers of each cluster have experienced this once, about 300-400 million years ago, and eventually turned back. The southern pair at the bottom of the image has two clusters that have come close for the first time. '
