Ghostly Gas

The ghostly glow of hot gas fills the space around the Spiderweb Galaxy in this recent image. The gas was imaged at radio wavelengths by an array of telescopes in Chile, while the background  galaxies were seen in visible light by Hubble Space Telescope. The Spiderweb is so far away that we see it as it looked almost 11 billion years ago, when the universe was only three billion years old. The Spiderweb is a member of a growing cluster of young galaxies, which are being pulled together by their mutual gravitational pull. [ESO/Di Mascolo et al./HST/H. Ford]