Virgo Cluster: Visible and X-Ray photo comparison -

This comparison shows that X-ray emission from the Virgo cluster comes

primarily from a giant gas or plasma cloud around giant

The material in this cloud has a temperature of 10-100 million degrees,

and is spread over a volume about 1 million light-years across.

A closer look at the images above reveals that all the other Messier and

some of the NGC galaxies are also X-ray sources which are significantly

weaker than M87, but detectable in our image.

A notable X-ray source occurs north-west of

M90 in the upper right part of our image;

the present author cannot detect an obvious optical counterpart from our

images.

Note especially the comet-like X-ray appearance of

M86: this galaxy seems to have a comet-like

tail in X-ray images, and is the second-brightest after M87 in our image.

As we know of its high peculiar velocity of over 1,500 km/sec in the

Virgo cluster, it apparently crashes through the intergalactic gas in

the Virgo cluster when traversing the huge gas or plasma cloud in the

central region of the cluster.

A closer investigation of the central X-ray emitting gas cloud is

possible in the images if the

Last Modification: 18 Mar 1998, 20:45 MET