Galaxy Cluster Hidden in Plain View

A team of astronomers has discovered the most distant cluster of red galaxies ever observed using FourStar, a new and powerful near-infrared camera on the 6.5m Magellan Baade Telescope. The galaxy cluster is located 10.5 billion light years away in the direction of the constellation Leo. It is made up of 30 galaxies packed closely together, forming the earliest known "galaxy city" in the universe.

An infared image of the cluster. Three narrow slices of the infrared spectrum are represented in this color composite. The colors have been balanced to accentuate the red galaxies at a distance of 10.5 billion light years.

Yet other billions of billions of billions of stars discovered in a tiny observable portion of our sky (one-fifth the apparent size of the Moon)...

And the most interesting part....

Remarkably, the cluster was completely missed by previous surveys, which searched this region of the sky for thousands of hours and were conducted by all the major ground- and space-based observing facilities, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Despite these intense observations, accurate distances for such faint and distant galaxies were missing until the advent of FourStar.

....makes me think how many "missed galaxies clusters" there are up there?

Read the full story here: Science Daily

Yes, it truly does make you wonder how many galaxies they seem to have casually "missed" hehe.


What a marvelous photograph. Thank you for posting this today, friend.

Originally posted by elevenaugust

....makes me think how many "missed galaxies clusters" there are up there?

We have already known that there is much more out there, than we could ever possibly know.


Regardless of how many are found, there will always be more, that are still waiting to be found.

reply to post by BrokenCircles


Yep, you bring up another very good point!
The universe is too big for us to even fathom, silly of us to think we can map it all out

As far as I can tell, the universe is infinite, it is always growing and has never stopped. So of course there is going to be new galaxies, or galaxies that are missed, honestly they are probably new though.

so how does this factor for the "missing mass of the universe"?
if we "missed" enough galaxies in our original surveys,
then some of hte missing mass can now be accounted for

interesting thread op

star and flag

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