[ad_1]
Astronomers have scanned the confines of space and discovered the largest collection of galaxies ever discovered.
These galaxies are grouped in a "proto-superamas" which has a collective mass of one million, billion times larger than our sun.
Nicknamed Hyperion in honor of the Titan of Greek mythology, this group is considered one of the oldest objects ever seen in space.
"Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It's as if we had been able to observe the adolescence of an 80-year-old human being, "said astronomer Steffen Miefke, chief operating officer of the European Southern Observatory.
Astronomers believe that, given its distance from the Earth, the group was created two billion years after the Big Bang. The Milky Way, on the other hand, is about 13.8 billion years old.
It was detected by the very large telescope (VLT) based in Chile and led by the European Space Agency (ESA).
"These are galaxies very far from us, almost at the beginning of the universe, and allow us to better understand how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang to the present day," Miefke said.
Brian Lemaux, astronomer of the University of California at Davis, co-author of the report, said the galaxies were becoming denser as gravity acted on them for billions of years.
"Superamasiers closer to Earth tend to appear as a much more concentrated mass distribution with clear structural features," said Lemaux. "But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more evenly across a series of connected blobs, peopled with loose associations of galaxies."
The research entitled "The offspring of a cosmic titan" will appear in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
[ad_2]
Source link
