NASA Chandra X-ray telescope captured a view of distant galaxy cluster SPT-CL J2215-3537 (aka SPT2215).
Credit; NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
Credit; NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
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TechTranscript
00:00Visit Chandra's beautiful universe.
00:05SPTCL J2215-3537
00:11Astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy cluster
00:15with an important quality, paving the way to learning how and when
00:19some of these gigantic structures form, and why the universe looks like it does in the present day.
00:25To find this distant and unusually young galaxy cluster,
00:29teams of scientists used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory,
00:33along with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the South Pole Telescope,
00:37and the Dark Energy Survey Project in Chile.
00:41The cluster's important quality is that it is relaxed,
00:45meaning that it is not being disrupted by violent collisions with other clusters of galaxies.
00:51This galaxy cluster, called SPTCL J2215-3537,
00:58or SPT-2215 for short, is about 8.4 billion light-years from Earth.
01:05This means our telescopes see it when the universe is only 5.3 billion years old,
01:10compared to its current age of 13.8 billion years.
01:15Galaxy clusters are enormous structures filled with individual galaxies,
01:20huge amounts of hot gas, and dark matter.
01:24In the case of SPT-2215, researchers estimate that it has a mass
01:29some 700 trillion times that of the Sun.
01:33Scientists think that galaxy clusters usually grow by merging with other clusters
01:38and smaller groups of galaxies over billions of years.
01:42This would have been especially true when the universe was younger.
01:46It was, therefore, surprising to find SPT-2215 at its large distance from Earth.
01:52In other words, this discovery suggests that SPT-2215
01:58has become relaxed earlier than expected for a typical galaxy cluster.
02:03Another interesting aspect of SPT-2215
02:08is the evidence for large amounts of star formation happening in its center.
02:13SPT-2215 has a very large galaxy in its middle,
02:18which in turn has a supermassive black hole at its core.
02:22The prodigious amount of star formation shows scientists
02:26that much of the hot gas has cooled to the point where new stars can form
02:30without outbursts driven by the black hole providing a heating source
02:34that prevents most of this cooling.
02:36This addresses an ongoing question of how much black holes stymie
02:40or support the birth of stars in their environments.
02:44Relaxed clusters like SPT-2215 are one of the signposts
02:49that have been used to measure the expansion of the universe.
02:52Adding distant objects like this to the sample of relaxed clusters
02:56allows astronomers to better constrain the acceleration of the cosmic expansion
03:01and the properties of the dark energy that drives it.
03:14NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology