28/08/2008 11:34 - (SA)
Washington - Space telescopes have captured images of a mammoth collision between two galaxy clusters that have shed some light into the universe’s mysterious dark matter, Nasa said.
The images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory show a clear separation between dark and ordinary matter during the clash 5.7 billion light years from Earth, the US space agency said on Wednesday.
The astronomers were able to differentiate between the two substances with a technique known as gravitational lensing in which dark matter appears in blue in the image while ordinary matter, which is mostly in the form of hot gas, looks pink.
As the two clusters merged at speeds of millions of miles per hour, the hot gas in each cluster collided and slowed down, the astronomers said. The dark matter, however, did not. more>>>
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