Chandra Release - August 26, 2015

Visual Description: Abell 1033

The composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 1033 shows a bright, irregularly shaped cloudy-looking object in the center of the image on a dark background. Colored in deep magenta-pink and blue, with a few slim pops of neon green, the two colliding clusters of galaxies are shown on a blanket of bright points of light. By combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands, NSF's Karl Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).  X-rays from Chandra are in pink and radio data from the VLA are colored green. The background image shows optical observations from the SDSS in pale yellow and a bit of pale pink and blue. A map of the density of galaxies, made from the analysis of optical data, is colored in blue.  The Chandra data reveal hot gas in the clusters, which seems to have been disturbed during the same collision that caused the re-ignition of radio emission in the system. The peak of the X-ray emission is near the bottom of the cluster, perhaps because the dense core of gas in the south is being stripped away by surrounding gas as it moves. The cluster in the north may not have entered the collision with a dense core, or perhaps its core was significantly disrupted during the merger. On the left side of the image, a so-called wide-angle tail radio galaxy shines in the radio (green). Lobes of plasma ejected by the supermassive black hole in its center are bent by the interaction with the cluster gas as the galaxy moves through it.