Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The Galaxy from the perspective of the Space Jockey
It would seem the Space Jockey must of mapped out almost every star in the sector it seems. But does it map out the hidden galaxies that are hiding in plain sight?
This part of space may look like nothing special, but it's actually a packed "galaxy city" composed of thirty ancient galaxies.This find took thousands of hours of observation before anyone noticed.
Located 10.5 billion light-years away, this galaxy cluster is the most distant and, consequently, the oldest known example of a red galaxy cluster. Red color gives us vital clues about the mass and configuration of the galaxies. We are catching this cluster way back in time in its earliest development. This discovery was found at the Carnegie Observatories where its astronomers say it could evolve to a giant, dense cluster of over a thousand galaxies.
This area of space has been under constant observation by a number of telescopes, including Hubble, and yet nobody suggested there was a galaxy cluster there. That's because this cluster is extremely faint and essentially invisible in all but a very narrow slice of the infrared spectrum.
The astronomers were able to detect the cluster using the new FourStar camera on the Magellan Bade Telescope, which is used to provide extremely accurate measurements of the distances between Earth and thousands of different galaxies. They in turn build up a 3D map of this area of the universe. Astronomers used this data to spot a strangely high concentration of galaxies at this particular point in space and time, revealing the existence of this cluster.
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