Chandra Release - January 10, 2012

Visual Description: El Gordo

This image features a composite image of a galaxy cluster named El Gordo, which translates to the “fat one” in Spanish. El Gordo is located about 7.2 billion light-years away from Earth, and consists of hundreds of galaxies held together by their mutual gravitational attraction. In the image, the galaxy cluster El Gordo appears as a soft blue, plump and slightly fuzzy comet, against a dark background. The image has a dense smattering of sources across it mostly colored red and orange, creating a measle-like texture. In the image, X-ray light from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is colored in blue, along with optical data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in red, green, and blue, and infrared emission from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in red and orange.  The X-ray data from Chandra reveal the distinct cometary appearance of El Gordo, including two short "tails" extending to the upper right of the image. El Gordo is the site of two galaxy clusters running into one another at several million miles per hour.