UC Irvine researchers using Hawaii’s Keck Telescope captured an image of galaxies merging 11.4 billion years ago — only 2 billion years after the Big Bang. It is the most distant object of its kind ever recorded, and shows the universe when it was only about 15 percent of its current age. (This image is a representative shot of the galaxies merging, not the actual merger.)

“The main discovery here is that we are witnessing a rare merger of massive galaxies in a bright system that allows us to analyze this process in detail,” said UCI postdoctoral researcher Jeff Cooke, who made the finding with Irvine scientists James Bullock and Elizabeth Barton.

“Because this system appears to be actually several massive galaxies merging together, it is likely to be the giant central core of a forming cluster of galaxies. Prior to this finding, the most distant cluster of this kind was recorded 9 billion years ago.

The newly discovered galaxy proto-cluster has been labeled LBG-2377, and is shown as a light-colored smudge in the middle of this photograph. The light in this image was released more than 7 billion years before the Earth formed.

“We would expect there to be some large galaxies in the early universe,” said Bullock, director of UCI’s Center for Cosmology. “But what’s so fascinating here is that we have several large galaxies falling together to form a massive structure that begins to rival some of the largest structure that we see in the present day universe.”

“The object we discovered is more than 10 times the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy, which itself contains more than 10 billion stars.”

Posted in: Ain't that interesting? • Astronomy and astrophysics |

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