Starship Asterisk*

Skyraider wrote:We all know that galexies are composed of billions of stars. My question is are there galexies that are composed of millions or billions of galexies?

June 5, 2006 CALGARY -- Astronomers at the 208th American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary announce the discovery of the most distant cluster of galaxies ever found, which may also be the most massive one yet seen at such an early era in the Universe. A cluster of galaxies is a large number of galaxies, gravitationally bound together, in a relatively small volume of space, all at the same distance from us.

"The key question now is: What's it doing there?" said Prof. Bob Nichol from the University of Portsmouth (England) and co-author on the paper. "This massive lump of matter is three-quarters the way back to the Big Bang!"

Almost 10 billion light-years from Earth (at a redshift z=1.45), cluster XMMXCS 2215-1738 contains hundreds of galaxies surrounded by superheated, X-ray-emitting gas at more than 10 million degrees. The XMM Cluster Survey (XCS) team used observations from the European X-ray Multi Mirror (XMM) Newton satellite to discovery this new cluster and then determined its distance using the 10-meter W. M. Keck telescope in Hawaii.