14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers handling the Chandra Space Telescope, one of NASA's four Great Observatories, have recently announced they they've discovered one of the most distant clusters of galaxies in the Universe, located at a distance of about 10.2 billion light-years away from our planet. According to the experts, the cluster maintains the same traits in the image of it we see today as it did when the Cosmos was only a quarter of its present age, Space reports.
The XMMXCS J2215.9-1738 cluster was until recently the farthest known such formation. The new formation exceeds its predecessor's distance by more than a billion light-years. Clusters are the largest manifestation of a gravitationally bound object in the entire Universe. They are made up of numerous galaxies, all held together by the force of their mutual gravitational interactions. The newly found one may provide astronomers with a wealth of knowledge about how the early Cosmos evolved at a crucial stage in its development.
The oldest known cluster, intuitively dubbed JKCS041, is found at such a great distance, that astronomers believe it may have been one of the first such structures to have ever formed after the Big Bang. The estimates are based on the amount of time that scientists believe would take for all of the galaxies in a cluster to form individually, and then to become gravitationally drawn to each other. “This object is close to the distance limit expected for a galaxy cluster. We don't think gravity can work fast enough to make galaxy clusters much earlier,” Stefano Andreon, a Chandra team member, explains.
The scientist holds an appointment at the National Institute for Astrophysics, in Milan, Italy. He adds that JKCS041 was first discovered three years ago, by the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). Further measurements, using Chandra, optical and infrared instruments on UKIRT, and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, in Hawaii, helped establish the distance the cluster had from our planet for certain. Details of the investigation have been accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“This discovery is exciting because it is like finding a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that is much older than any other known. One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more, you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved. The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology,” Chandra team member Ben Maughan, at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, concludes.