Zooming in on Pandora’s Cluster | Hubble

Zooming in on Pandora’s Cluster | Hubble

This sequence starts with a broad view of the southern skies. We close in on an apparently empty region of sky in the faint constellation of Sculptor. As we zoom in further we can start to make out a cloud of faint galaxies that is revealed in the final NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope image to be a spectacularly rich merging cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744, and nicknamed Pandora's Cluster. This remarkable object seems to be the result of the collision of at least four separate galaxy clusters.

Distance: 4 billion light years

Credit: ESO/NASA/ESA and J. Merten (Heidelberg/Bologna)/D. Coe (STScI)/Digitized Sky Survey 2/A. Fujii

Duration: 1 minute

Release Date: Feb. 17, 2016

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