Oldest Galaxy Protocluster Containing 12 Galaxies In Constellation Cetus – Discovered

| October 1, 2019 | Astronomy | No Comments

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A collection of 12 galaxies which existed about 13.0 billion years ago, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers using the Subaru, Keck, and Gemini Telescopes.

This is the earliest protocluster ever found. One of the 12 galaxies is a giant object, known as Himiko, which was discovered a decade ago by the Subaru Telescope and named for a mythological queen in ancient Japan.

The most distant protocluster discovered by the Subaru Telescope. The blue shading shows the calculated extent of the protocluster, and the bluer color indicates higher density of galaxies in the protocluster. The red objects in zoom-in figures are the 12 galaxies found in it. This figure shows a square field-of-view 24 arcminutes along each side (corresponding to 198 million light-years along each side at a distance of 13 billion light-years). Each zoom-in figure is 16 arcseconds along each side (corresponding to 2.2 million light-years). Credit: NAOJ/Harikane et al.

The most distant protocluster discovered by the Subaru Telescope. The blue shading shows the calculated extent of the protocluster, and the bluer color indicates higher density of galaxies in the protocluster. The red objects in zoom-in figures are the 12 galaxies found in it. This figure shows a square field-of-view 24 arcminutes along each side (corresponding to 198 million light-years along each side at a distance of 13 billion light-years). Each zoom-in figure is 16 arcseconds along each side (corresponding to 2.2 million light-years). Credit: NAOJ/Harikane et al.

This discovery suggests that large structures such as protoclusters already existed when the Universe was only about 800 million years old, 6 percent of its present age.

“A protocluster is a rare and special system with an extremely high density, and not easy to find. To overcome this problem, we used the wide field of view of the Subaru Telescope to map a large area of the sky and look for protoclusters,” Yuichi Harikane, a JSPS fellow at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan who led the team of astronomers said in a press release.

In the map of the universe made by the Subaru Telescope, the team discovered a protocluster candidate, z66OD, where galaxies are 15 times more concentrated than normal for that era. Additional tests confirmed 12 galaxies which existed 13.0 billion years ago, making it the earliest protocluster known to date.

In 2009, the Subaru Telescope helped to discover, one of the 12 galaxies in z66OD was a giant object with a huge body of gas, known as Himiko, which was found previously by

“It is reasonable to find a protocluster near a massive object, such as Himiko. However, we’re surprised to see that Himiko was located not in the center of the protocluster, but on the edge 500 million light-years away from the center,” said Masami Ouchi, a team member at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the University of Tokyo.

“It is still not understood why Himiko is not located in the center. These results will be a key for understanding the relationship between clusters and massive galaxies.”

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff

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