ESO releases massive image of nearby Fornax Cluster

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- The European Southern Observatory has released a 2.3-gigapixel image of the Fornax Cluster, the second most populous galaxy cluster within 100 million light-years of the Milky Way. The image is one of the largest ever released by ESO.

The giant image was captured using the VLT Survey Telescope, located at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. It was captured as part of the ongoing Fornax Deep Survey, an effort to render the galaxy cluster in a variety of wavelengths.

The cluster's brightest galaxy is NGC 1316, which was formed by the mergers of several smaller galaxies. The outer layers of the galaxy's lens-like structure feature a variety of ripples and other types of perturbations -- evidence of its dynamic history.

The galaxy's history of mergers has furnished it with a massive supply of gas, which feeds a supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. The black hole boasts a mass 150 million times the mass of the sun. Its appetite fuels relativistic jets, which eject high-energy particles at tremendous speeds, exciting the surrounding material and triggering the emission of intense radio waves. As a result, NGC 1316 is the fourth-brightest radio source in the sky.

NGC 1316 has also hosted four observed type Ia supernovae, the explosive collapse of a binary star system. The bright flash produced by type Ia supernovae help astronomers measure the distance of the host galaxy as well as the distance of more remote cosmic objects. Astronomers used type Ia supernovae, called "standard candles," to measure the expansion of the universe.