The team of Hubble Space Telescope scientists led by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the findings of the largest galaxy cluster in the universe.
It is not excessive to call it the greatest because its mass reaches 3 million billion times the sun and this is the first time successfully calculated in 2014.
This massive galaxy is named El Gordo, which in Spanish means fat. The other name is ACT-CLJ0101-4915.
In a release issued by NASA on Tuesday (16/1/2018), they call this X-ray galaxy cluster is not only the largest, but also the hottest and brightest.
This galaxy cluster is the largest object in the universe bound to gravity and they need billions of years in its formation.
Smaller groups of galaxies slowly gather
As reported by Science Daily on Tuesday (16/1/2018), in 2012 observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Atacama Cosmology Telescope show that El Gordo is actually composed of two groups of galaxies collide.
The formation of galaxy clusters is highly dependent on dark matter and dark energy. By studying such a cluster, it ultimately helps to explain this elusive phenomenon.
Then in 2014, the new Hubble telescope discovered that most of the mass of El Gordo is hidden in the form of dark matter.
The captured evidence suggests that the normal El Gordo material is largely composed of hot, bright gases in the X-ray wavelength domain. The hot gas slows down while the dark matter does not.
This image was taken by Hubble's camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observation program called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey).
RELICS imaged 41 large galaxy clusters in order to find the brightest galaxy for the study of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to be launched in 2019.