Globular Clusters within the Coma Cluster
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) reveals thousands of globular clusters lying at the core of the Coma Cluster, a huge gathering of over 1000 galaxies, about 320 million light-years away, bound together by gravity. Astronomers have spotted over 22,000 globular clusters, some of which had formed a bridge connecting a pair of well-known interacting galaxies (NGC 4889 and NGC 4874). A globular cluster is a spherical group of stars that usually orbits a galaxy as a self-contained satellite. However, the ones studied here are of a different type: intracluster globular clusters. These are globular clusters that are not bound to an individual galaxy, but to a galaxy cluster, in this case, the Coma Cluster, one of the first places where observed gravitational anomalies indicated the existence of dark matter.
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Photo credit: © Science History Images / Alamy / Afripics
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