(ORDO NEWS) — The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has shown for the first time an image of a supermassive cluster of galaxies that formed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang.
The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Phys.org briefly talks about it.
The supercluster of galaxies has been designated SPT2349-56. It was detected in the submillimeter range by the South Pole Telescope. This cluster is located so far from the Earth that the light from it has been moving towards our planet for more than 12 billion years.
According to scientists, the cluster contains over thirty galaxies, and it was formed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. In other words, light from one of the earliest objects in the universe has been caught on Earth.
Several of the brightest light sources were recorded in the cluster. The most notable of these is the complex formed as a result of the merger of more than twenty galaxies.
It also turned out to be one of the most active star formation complexes in the entire history of observations. It is estimated that this cluster produces more than ten thousand stars a year.
The simulations carried out by the researchers suggest that the active processes of star formation in this cluster are similar to the processes that occurred in the early Universe, when its size was much smaller than it is now.
However, scientists note that in the cluster of galaxies there is already a shortage of molecular gas. This suggests that the activity of the cluster is gradually approaching the end of its turbulent phase, since there is less and less gaseous raw material for creating new stars in it.
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