News in Brief Astronomy

Galactic collision creates huge particle collider

Jet shoots out of crash among four galaxy clusters

CLUSTER COLLISION  As four galaxy clusters collide, gas (blue) heated to many millions of degrees Celsius fills the space between galaxies. Charged particles move near the speed of light along a jet (red, center) that is 2.5 million light-years long. The image is a composite of data from the Very Large Array, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.

Van Weeren et al., Bill Saxton/NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA

By Christopher Crockett

- More than 2 years ago

BOSTON — A galactic pileup 5 billion light-years away is building a powerful particle accelerator, up to a million times as strong as Earth’s mightiest, the Large Hadron Collider.