By combining a new image of a giant galaxy cluster with older X-ray data, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have demonstrated how the cluster's galaxies are suffused by huge amounts of gas that can reach scorching temperatures up to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).
The galaxy cluster, Abell 2390, was imaged recently by ESA's Euclid mission, designed to study dark matter and dark energy by probing gravitational lensing occurrences in galaxy clusters. Because these clusters contain so much mass — up to ten trillion solar masses worth — they're able to bend the fabric of space-time around them, warping it to such a degree that light from distant galaxies in the background becomes highly magnified. It's as though you're looking at them through a gigantic magnifying lens. If we zoom in on the core of Abell 2390, we see that the lensing effect is at its most pronounced, stretching, warping and amplifying the light of other galaxies billions of light-years farther away.
