With the unwieldy official name of XDCP J0044.0-2033 researchers have nicknamed the cluster “Gioiello,” meaning “jewel” in Italian. And it’s a fitting name due to the brightness of the energetic star-forming galaxies in X-ray wavelengths, which NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatories are designed to detect.
About 6.2 million light-years across in its entirety, the Gioiello cluster is located in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale. Its estimated age is about 800 million years — which is very young for such a massive cluster at that distance. By comparison our own Milky Way galaxy is at least 13.4 billion years old, if not older.
“Unlike the galaxy clusters that are close to us, this cluster still has lots of stars forming within its galaxies,” said study co-author Joana Santos. “This gives us a unique window into what galaxy clusters are like when they are very young.”
Combined with other recent discoveries of extremely massive and distant galaxy clusters — such as El Gordo, seven billion light-years away — these findings are forcing a reconsideration of how the early universe evolved.
From Discovery News
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