Astronomers have glimpsed the largest cluster of galaxies ever seen in the distant, early universe. The above image was the one used to comfirm their findings, and is in visible light. The image below (click to enlarge) was the one in which they originally found this super massive galaxy cluster.
The discovery of this far-off group, estimated to contain as much mass as aA galaxy cluster is a formation in the larger Universe consisting of many many hundreds of galaxies drawn to each other's gravitational pull. For example, our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a much larger calaxy cluster which is mergining with the Virgo galaxy cluster.
thousand large galaxies, offers further proof of the existence of the enigmatic
force called dark energy.
"This is the most luminous, and therefore probably the most massive, cluster
of galaxies discovered at this epoch," said Georg Lamer of the
Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam in Germany, who led the team that
discovered it. "The light we observe started about 7.7 billion years ago. This
is about half of the age of the universe, so it is from quite long ago, and
quite far away."*
The Milky Way
*(from SPACE.com)
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