An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of new giant proto-galaxie scluster – SXDS_gPC. This newly discovered protocluster was identified at a red shift of 5.7, that is, at a time when the age of our Universe was only one billion years.
Clusters of galaxies contain from several hundred to several thousand galaxies connected by means of gravity. They are the largest gravitationally related structures of the Universe, which can serve as excellent laboratories for studying the evolution of galaxies and cosmology.
Of particular interest to astronomers are the proto-galaxies – the forerunners of clusters of galaxies. Such objects found at large redshifts can provide valuable information about the early stages of the evolution of the Universe. However, the discovery of such structures at high redshifts is very complex and requires deep surveys of the sky with large areas of field of view for the correct identification of protoclusters.
Recently, a research team led by Linhua Jiang from Peking University, PRC, used a multi-object spectrograph called M2FS mounted on a 6.5-meter Magellan Clay telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, to conduct a spectroscopic view of galaxies in within a sky area of four square degrees. The main objects of these observations were new galaxies, demonstrating bright lines of Lyman-alpha radiation and lying at redshifts from 5.7 to 6.5.
As part of the study, dozens of candidates for the role of galaxies intensively emitting in the Lyman-alpha line were detected, and an increase in the concentration of such objects was observed at a red shift of 5.7 within the sky section called the XMM-Newton Deep Survey (SXDS) field. In the course of research in this area with an increased concentration of Lyman-alpha galaxies, a giant galaxies protoscopy was discovered, which was designated SXDS_gPC.
According to the study, the cluster of galaxies SXDS_gPC, which supposedly collapses into a giant cluster of galaxies, occupies approximately 35 x 35 x 35 cubic megaparsecs and has a mass of about 3.6 quadrillion (3.6 * 10^15) masses of the Sun. This makes it one of the most massive proto-galaxies of galaxies currently known.
Moreover, astronomers believe that the protocling of SXDS_gPC galaxies will help to better understand the process of space reionization, which ended at a redshift of about 6.0.
A new giant protocluster of galaxies discovered at a large redshift
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