In 2010 the Hubble Space Telescope launched three bold new initiatives that came to be called the Multi-Cycle Treasury programs. One was the CANDELS program, the parent of this blog. Another was the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury program (PHAT), a deep and detailed study of the nearby galaxy M31, led by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington. The third program was called CLASH: the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (tortured acronyms were a prerequisite for approval of the HST time). The CLASH team (not to be confused with The Clash) is led by Marc Postman from the Space Telescope Science Institute, and includes about 50 astronomers at some 25 institutions around the world. This survey is in many ways a close sister to the CANDELS program, and indeed there is significant overlap across the two groups, especially in the supernova search component, which has been a joint CLASH+CANDELS effort.
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| Galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 (or MACS 1206 for short) as viewed through Hubble in the CLASH program. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), and the CLASH Team |
The CLASH program takes a deep look at 25 massive galaxy clusters. These are collections of galaxies (a few hundred in each), hot gas (heated to above 10 million degrees), and dark matter (more on that mysterious stuff below). The clusters in the CLASH sample sit at redshifts between about 0.2 and 0.9, so we are seeing them at a fairly recent epoch in terms of cosmic history (the universe was already more than 6 billion years old when the light we see left these clusters). Several of these clusters have been studied in great detail, but the CLASH program has opened up a new window to look in at one of the great mysteries of the universe: the nature of dark matter.
When Hubble looks at a galaxy cluster in the CLASH survey, it captures the ultraviolet, optical, and infrared light emitted by billions upon billions of stars in the many galaxies that live within the cluster. Astronomers have long known, however, that these stars make up only a small fraction of the total contents of these clusters. Far more important is the hot gas in the Intra-Cluster Medium (ICM). This superheated gas (mostly Hydrogen and Helium) has been stripped away from the galaxies by tidal gravitational forces and the effects of ram pressure. The gas is so hot that it emits x-ray radiation, which can be observed using x-ray observatories like Chandra and XMM-Newton. The mass of gas in a typical galaxy cluster is almost 10 times greater than the total mass of all the stars in all the member galaxies. However, even after counting up all of the stars and gas, we still have only captured about 10% of the total mass of the galaxy cluster. The other 90% is (presumably) in the form of dark matter.
"Dark matter" is the name we assign to all the mass in the universe that does not emit any light. There are a number of theories as to what this dark matter could be, and the most promising idea right now seems to be that it is some form of elementary particle that does not interact with other matter -- except through the force of gravity. In galaxy clusters, we have two primary lines of evidence that reveal the presence of a large concentration of dark matter. First, the motions of the galaxies in the cluster show that there must be a large central mass pulling the galaxies in and through the cluster (more mass than we can account for in stars and gas). Second, we see the effect of the dark matter on background galaxies through gravitational lensing.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the force of gravity is in fact a warping of spacetime. This distortion of the fabric of our universe affects all forms of matter -- as we see in the motions of planets, stars and galaxies -- and it also affects light itself. In the CLASH clusters, the warping is sufficiently strong to bend the pathway of light rays passing through the cluster. This results in a lensing effect, as light rays are distorted and redirected such that they focus on our location here in the Milky Way. We see the extraordinary evidence for this lensing in the form of absurdly stretched galaxies, long arcs, and impossibly bright background sources that have been distorted and magnified by the cluster's gravitational lens.
The principal aim of the CLASH program is to use these lensing artifacts to construct detailed models of the matter content of each of the 25 clusters. The cluster models are built by piecing together these distorted background sources to make a map of the dark matter that Hubble cannot see. Adding in evidence from the star light and the x-ray gas emission provides a complete picture of all the content in the cluster. With all of this information, the CLASH team has been able to improve our understanding of how these clusters are formed, and even to put new constraints on the nature of the dark matter fluid that dominates the cluster.
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| The tiny red blob (just a fraction of the size of our Milky Way) is among the most distant galaxies ever observed. The object is observed just 420 million years after the big bang, and is only visible to the Hubble Space Telescope due to the magnification from the massive galaxy cluster MACS0647, which lies in between us and the distant proto-galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman and D. Coe (STScI), and the CLASH Team |
The science work of the CLASH team is still in progress, and we expect many more exciting discoveries are yet to come. Hubble is not done with deep galaxy cluster surveys, either, as the new Frontier Fields initiative has already begun to follow in the footsteps of CLASH.
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