NASA Hubble Team Finds Monster 'El Gordo' Galaxy
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has weighed the largest known galaxy cluster in
the distant universe, catalogued as ACT-CL J0102-4915, and found it definitely
lives up to its nickname -- El Gordo (Spanish for "the fat one").
By measuring how much the cluster's gravity warps images of galaxies in the
distant background, a team of astronomers has calculated the cluster's mass to
be as much as 3 million billion times the mass of our sun. Hubble data show the
galaxy cluster, which is 9.7 billion light-years away from Earth, is roughly 43
percent more massive than earlier estimates.
The team used Hubble to measure how strongly the mass of the cluster warped
space. Hubble's high resolution allowed measurements of so-called "weak
lensing," where the cluster's immense gravity subtly distorts space like a
funhouse mirror and warps images of background galaxies. The greater the
warping, the more mass is locked up in the cluster.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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