\nThe University of Michigan News Service \n<\/p>\n

\nFeb. 24, 2005\n<\/p>\n

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—An international team of astronomers using the world’s
\nlargest X-ray and optical telescopes have spotted the most distant
\nmassive object ever detected, a cluster of galaxies 9 billion light
\nyears distant from Earth.<\/p>\n

\nThe cluster of galaxies is so far away that the
\nlight detected by the team is much older than the Earth itself. The
\ngalaxy cluster, if it is even still there, would be at least 11 billion
\nyears old now.\n<\/p>\n

\n“By capturing this ancient, 9-billion-year-old
\nlight, we have a snapshot of the universe at a youthful age of less
\nthan 5 billion years, which is about 1\/3 of the present age,” said
\nproject leader Christopher Mullis, a research fellow in the University
\nof Michigan’s Department of Astronomy.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs exciting as it is to break a record, it’s also
\nan important cosmological finding. “Just a few years ago, astronomers
\ndid not believe structures like this even existed at such an early
\ntime,” Mullis said. This galaxy cluster, which is being seen as it
\nappeared about 2 billion years after its formation, is well-organized
\nand “mature,” he said. Although it is very far back in time, it looks
\nas if this structure had formed in a way that is consistent with more
\nrecent structures.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Even at this early stage in cosmic history, this
\nappears already as a mature, fully assembled structure which implies
\nthat this is an old cluster in a young universe,” said European
\nSouthern Observatory astronomer Piero Rosati, who collaborated on the
\nstudy.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe record-breaking galaxy cluster was also a
\nsomewhat surprising find for the team, who were testing a new approach
\nto hunting distant objects. “Basically we stepped up to the plate for
\nour first time at bat with this new system, and we hit a home run,”
\nMullis said.\n<\/p>\n

\nMullis and his colleagues started their search by
\ncombing through archives of old images from the European Space Agency’s
\norbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, looking for diffuse X-ray
\nsources that had not been previously studied. Cluster galaxies shine
\nbrightly in optical light, but they also emit strong X-ray signals
\nresulting from very hot gas that envelopes the cluster.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe record-breaking cluster initially turned up, small but distinct, off center in an image made by another team.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe X-ray image of the distant cluster is comprised
\nof just 280 photons—individual parcels of light—collected over a
\n12.5-hour exposure. By comparison, on a sunny day the human eye is
\nflooded by about 10 quadrillion photons per second.\n<\/p>\n

\nWith this distant cluster candidate and dozens of
\nothers culled from the X-ray archive, Mullis and his team then turned
\nto one of the world’s largest optical telescopes, the European Southern
\nObservatory’s Very Large Telescope, located in the Atacama Desert,
\nChile. They took a series of relatively quick exposures of the
\ncandidates with red and blue filters on the telescope.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat Mullis and his Italian and German
\ncollaborators were looking for at each of the candidate spots were very
\nred galaxies, indicating light that has traveled for an extremely long
\ntime to reach Earth. “The redder the better,” Mullis said. Almost
\nimmediately, they turned up this cluster of red objects that seemed to
\nbe beyond the previous distance record.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I spent a full day rechecking my data before I
\ncalled any of the other scientists,” Mullis said. “It appeared to be
\nalmost unbelievably distant.”\n<\/p>\n

\nSubsequent, more detailed measurements on 12 major
\ngalaxies in the cluster were used to confirm that they were equidistant
\nfrom Earth at about 9 billion light years. The entire cluster is
\nprobably hundreds or even thousands of galaxies held together by
\ngravity, Mullis said\n<\/p>\n

\nCollaborator Hans Bohringer of the Max Planck
\nInstitute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany said the
\ndiscovery “encourages us to search for additional distant clusters
\nusing the same efficient techniques used to locate the present cluster.”\n<\/p>\n

\nMullis and his team are going to broaden the search
\nto find more super-distant galaxy clusters with this new approach. They
\nalso plan to go back and take longer optical and X-ray telescope
\nexposures of the record-setting cluster to get a better sense of its
\nfeatures.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Finding it is one thing,” Mullis said. “We also
\nneed to go back in there and maximize that return.” With enough data on
\nthis and other super-distant massive objects, Mullis expects to find
\nnew answers to some fundamental questions of how the universe formed.\n<\/p>\n

\nMullis will be presenting this finding at an
\ninternational astronomy conference in Hawaii focused on connecting
\ngalaxy clusters to the underlying physics of space time and gravity.
\nThe meeting is being organized by U-M physics professor Gus Evrard, and
\nsponsored in part by the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics.\n<\/p>\n

\n“It’s special to live in the era of human history
\nwhen the terrain of the whole visible universe is being revealed,”
\nEvrard said.\n<\/p>\n

\nA paper by Mullis and his team will also appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.\n<\/p>\n

\n \n<\/p>\n

\nCopyright © 2005 The Regents of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA 734-764-1817\n<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.umich.edu\/news\/index.html?Releases\/2005\/Feb05\/r022405a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Michigan News Service  Feb. 24, 2005 ANN ARBOR, Mich.—An international team of astronomers using the world’s largest X-ray and optical telescopes have spotted the most distant massive object ever detected, a cluster of galaxies 9 billion light years distant from Earth. The cluster of galaxies is so far away that the light… More \u00bbAstronomers eclipse record for most distant massive object<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","neve_meta_reading_time":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourbigclan.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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