First sighting of hot gas sloshing in galaxy cluster
I&#x27;m the lead author on this paper, so feel free to ask questions!<p>EDIT: I should say the analogy for these kinds of events is like wine sloshing in a glass. The hot X-ray emitting atmosphere of a galaxy cluster would sit calmly in the gravitational potential well. Likely what is happening is that a smaller subcluster passes close to the main cluster. This causes the graviational potential to shift across, the atmosphere is out of equilibrium and therefore sloshes back and forward for billions of years.<p>These are fascinating objects. Up to 10^15 more massive than our sun, mostly made of dark matter (80-90%) and most of the normal baryonic matter is in the form of a hot plasma, heated up by shocks as the cluster grew by mergers and accretion of subclusters.