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Galaxy cluster most distant from earth found |
| TheAllINeed.com/NC&T/DUMC/ |
Almost 10 billion light-years from Earth, cluster XMM-XCS 2215-1734 contains hundreds of galaxies surrounded by hot X-ray-emitting gas.
The existence of the cluster so early in the history of the universe challenges ideas about how galaxies formed, said lead author Adam Stanford, a research scientist at UC Davis and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"It's like finding a picture of your grandfather as an adult in the nineteenth century -- how could he have existed so long ago?" Stanford said.
Using the temperature of the X-ray emitting gas, Kivanc Sabirli, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, determined that the cluster is approximately 500 trillion times the mass of our sun. Most of the mass is "dark matter," a mysterious, invisible form of matter that dominates the mass of all galaxies in the universe.
The XMM Cluster Survey (XCS) team used observations from the European X-ray Multi Mirror (XMM) Newton satellite to discover the cluster and then determined its distance from Earth using the 10-meter W.M. Keck telescope in Hawaii. The team is working on a long-term observing program to find hundreds more such clusters using telescopes around the world.
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