Coma Cluster

Coma cluster, nearest rich cluster of galaxies containing thousands of systems. The Coma cluster lies about 330 million light-years away, about seven times farther than the Virgo cluster, in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices. The main body of the Coma cluster has a diameter of about 25 million light-years, but enhancements above the background can be traced out to a supercluster of a diameter of about 200 million light-years. Ellipticals or S0s constitute 85 percent of the bright galaxies in the Coma cluster; the two brightest ellipticals in Coma are located near the centre of the system and are individually more than 10 times as luminous as the Andromeda Galaxy. These galaxies have a swarm of smaller companions orbiting them and may have grown to their bloated sizes by a process of “galactic cannibalism” like that hypothesized to explain the supergiant elliptical cD systems.

The spatial distribution of galaxies in rich clusters such as the Coma cluster closely resembles what one would expect theoretically for a bound set of bodies moving in the collective gravitational field of the system. Yet, if one measures the dispersion of random velocities of the Coma galaxies about the mean, one finds that it amounts to almost 900 km per second (500 miles per second). For a galaxy possessing this random velocity along a typical line of sight to be gravitationally bound within the known dimensions of the cluster requires Coma to have a total mass of about 5 × 10¹⁵ solar masses. The total luminosity of the Coma cluster is measured to be about 3 × 10¹³ solar luminosities; therefore, the mass-to-light ratio in solar units required to explain Coma as a bound system exceeds by an order of magnitude what can be reasonably ascribed to the known stellar populations. A similar situation exists for every rich cluster that has been examined in detail. When Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered this discrepancy in 1933, he inferred that much of the Coma cluster was made of nonluminous matter. The existence of nonluminous matter, or “dark matter,” was later confirmed in the 1970s by American astronomers Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford.