Astronomy Seminar: When Galaxy Clusters Collide: Recent Results from the NuSTAR and Chandra X-ray Observatories
| Date/Time: | Friday, 13 Nov 2020 from 4:10 pm to 5:10 pm |
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| Location: | Online |
| Cost: | 0.00 |
| Contact: | Curt Struck |
| Phone: | 515-294-3666 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Clusters of galaxies are the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the universe, growing through mergers with galaxies and other galaxy clusters. Collisions between clusters release huge amounts of energy---more than any other event since the Big Bang. Hot, X-ray emitting gas fills the volume between the galaxies in clusters, and cluster-cluster collisions drive shock waves and turbulence through the gas, which can also accelerate cosmic ray electrons and ions to close to the speed of light. I will present work on several different merging galaxy clusters observed with the X-ray telescopes NuSTAR and Chandra, where we expect to find shock fronts in X-ray images---and sometimes do---and evidence for cosmic ray electrons---which we generally do not. These results will be discussed in the larger context of how galaxy clusters grow and evolve over time and their implications for using clusters as a way to study cosmology.