Release Date: March 10, 2010 - Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported, out to more than 2.5 billion light-years. Abell 1689, redshift 0.181. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/ESA/L. Bradley/JHU To learn more go to: <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2010/10-023.html" rel="nofollow">www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2010/10-023.html</a> To see other visualizations related to this story go to: <a href="http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10580" rel="nofollow">svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10580</a>
Image release August 19, 2010 An international team of astronomers using gravitational lensing observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step forward in the quest to solve the riddle of dark energy, a phenomenon which mysteriously appears to power the Universe's accelerating expansion. Their results appear in the 20 August 2010 issue of the journal Science. This image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 1689, with the mass distribution of the dark matter in the gravitational lens overlaid (in purple). The mass in this lens is made up partly of normal (baryonic) matter and partly of dark matter. Distorted galaxies are clearly visible around the edges of the gravitational lens. The appearance of these distorted galaxies depends on the distribution of matter in the lens and on the relative geometry of the lens and the distant galaxies, as well as on the effect of dark energy on the geometry of the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Jullo (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM). To view a video of this image go to: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4909967467">www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4909967467</a> <b><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html" rel="nofollow">NASA Goddard Space Flight Center</a></b> is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe. <b>Follow us on <a href="http://twitter.com/NASA_GoddardPix" rel="nofollow">Twitter</a></b> <b>Join us on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greenbelt-MD/NASA-Goddard/395013845897?ref=tsd" rel="nofollow">Facebook</a></b> To read more go to: <a href="http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1014/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+hubble_news+(Hubble+News)" rel="nofollow">www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1014/?utm_source=feedburn...</a>
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, containing about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows the inner region of Abell 1689, an immense cluster of galaxies located 2.2 billion light-years away. The cluster gravitational field is warping light from background galaxies, causing them to appear as arcs.