NOIRLab’s 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) captured this brilliant image of just a small section of the 230 galaxies that so far have been found to make up the Antlia Cluster, located 130 million light-years from Earth in the Antlia constellation. What stands out most are the two massive elliptical galaxies: NGC 3268 (center) and NGC 3258 (lower right).
Those two central galaxies are surrounded by a number of faint dwarf galaxies. Astronomers believe that NGC 3628 and NGC 3258 are in the process of merging, based on X-ray observations that revealed a ‘rope’ of globular clusters along the peak area of light between them. This could also mean that the Antlia cluster is actually two smaller clusters that are combining.
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The cluster is rich in lenticular galaxies — a type of disk galaxy that has little interstellar matter and thus little ongoing star formation — and also hosts some irregular galaxies. A plethora of rarer, low-luminosity dwarf galaxies have been found in the cluster, including ultra-compact dwarfs, compact ellipticals, and blue compact dwarfs,” said NOIRLab.
