Bullet Cluster image has me confused

[manifolder]

If you look at the image of the bullet cluster:

http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/%7Etaillet/doss ... _f2048.jpg

You'll see to the left of center a thin line. What is this? I have not seen anything like this before. What could it be?

 

[silylene]

Interesting I don't know. Perhaps it is a lense or imaging artifact from overlapping filters, or something like that. If you look closely, there seems to be a few faint slightly curved line-trails to the left of the brighter line.

Or perhaps it is a deformed pinwheel galaxy, seen perfectly edge on?

 

[MeteorWayne]

If you look at the image of the bullet cluster:

http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/%7Etaillet/doss ... _f2048.jpg

You'll see to the left of center a thin line. What is this? I have not seen anything like this before. What could it be?

Not sure what you are talking about. Can you be a bit more specific as to the location? Is it in the magenta or blue areas to the left of center, or to the left of the blue area?

 

[BoJangles2]

It seems like he is talking about the left hand magenta area, with the big red arced line.

Seems like an artifact, but im no where near qualified to make a judgment

 

[MeteorWayne]

Thanx BoJangles, that helped me find it. My first guess would be that it a backround galaxy distorted by the mass of the Bullet cluster. After all, the purpose of this image was to demonstrate that the dark matter content of the cluster far exceeded the visible matter; that was made because of the distortions on the backround galaxies.
I don't know for sure, I'll have to find the original paper.
MW

 

[manifolder]

yah the one identified is the one im talking about, I made the same rationalizations about the artifact, could be a disk seen head on, could be some filter/imaging artifact. Looks odd though, maybe its some sort of alien-made artifact. It's been bothering all day since I saw it, I've been saying what the hell is this thing periodically through the work-day.

 

[bobw]

Meteor Wayne nailed it while I was looking around.

That picture is a composite image from several telescopes. The red is from Chandra, the "white" from Hubble and Magellan, the blue is a computed mass distribution deduced from gravitational lensing and not really a "picture" at all. Since most of the mass (blue) isn't where the light (red/white) comes from they interpret it as evidence for the existence of dark matter.

The streak really got me going and I looked around a lot. The best spots I found are here:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/more.html
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/media/

The first has links to almost all the separate parts of the picture. I say almost because I haven't been able to find separate pictures from the Hubble and Magellan observatories, my guess was the streak is only in one of them, but now I think both. The second has a links to several .pdfs that tell how they made the picture and has the Magellan part but it is very low res. The X-ray part doesn't have the streak but the optical part does. In the optical picture it is very faint. As they layer on the Chandra and computed parts the pixels add up and get brighter and brighter.

My initial guess was that it is a comet, asteroid or maybe Oort cloud object because it looked thin to be from gravitational lensing. Well, I'm glad I looked before I typed because page 14 of the last .pdf has pictures of your arc and more! I now think it is gravitational lensing of a background galaxy and part of what they used to compute the blue part of your original picture.

Here's a link to A Direct Empirical Proof of the Existence of Dark Matter .
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1 ... /paper.pdf

The .pdf with the arc.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0608408v1.pdf