Chilean scientists unveil a cluster of galaxies "A cosmic titan"

Astronomers observing billions of light-years away in space have detected the largest collection of galaxies ever recorded in the early days of the universe, a "proto-super-cluster" that they nicknamed Hyperion after a titan of Greek mythology. Hyperion has a mbad 1 million billion times greater than the sun and is so far apart that it is seen from Earth as it seemed billions of years ago.

"Hyperion, it's like 5,000 galaxies of the Milky Way," said astronomer Steffen Miefke, chief operating officer of the European Southern Observatory, to Reuters. ESO operates the very large telescope (VLT) in Chile, which has detected Hyperion.

Hyperion is a teenager in terms of astronomy. Its distance from the Earth means that astronomers see it because it was created a little over 2 billion years after the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe there are about 13, 8 billion years old.

"These are galaxies very far from us, almost beginning of the universe, and allow us to better understand how the universe has evolved since the Big Bang until today," he said. said Miefke.

"Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It is as if we could observe the teenage years of an 80 year old human being. "

The galaxy of the Milky Way, which hosts our solar system, is about 13.6 billion years old.

Hyperion was detected using the visible multi-object spectrograph, who, according to his managers, acts as a "time machine in the middle of the desert, showing us what the universe looked like when he was only one-third of his current age". [19659003] The spectrograph is hosted by the very large telescope based in Chile The discovery was made by a team led by Olga Cucciati of the National Institute of Astrophysics of Bologna, Italy.

The Telescope rests in the Chilean desert, 300 km north of the capital Santiago,

In California, Davis, co-author of the report, said that galaxies were densifying under the effect of gravity for billions

"Superclusters close to the Earth tend to give the impression of". 9, a much more concentrated distribution of mbad with structural features, "said Lemaux. "But in Hyperion, the mbad is distributed much more evenly across a series of connected tasks, populated with loose galaxy badociations."

The research entitled "The Offspring of a Cosmic Titan" will appear in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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