Thursday, January 13, 2011

One Billion Years, A. B. B.

Astronomers have recently been able to build an image of a galaxy cluster as it existed a scant one billion years after the Big Bang. That makes the cluster the oldest and most distant yet seen.

The Chandra and Hubble space telescopes and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii were used to piece the image together. It shows a "protocluster" 40 million lights years across populated by galaxies thick with gas and dust-- a perfect environment for the growth of huge, bright stars that existed only a short time before exploding. Quasars and black holes were also identified.

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