WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The most distant galaxy cluster yet discovered has been observed creating new stars at a rate of 3,000 per year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a press release on Tuesday.
"This galaxy cluster isn’t just remarkable for its distance, it’s also going through an amazing growth spurt unlike any we’ve ever seen," said French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) lead scientist Tao Wang said in the release.
The core of CL J1001 contains eleven massive galaxies, nine of which are experiencing an impressive baby boom of stars, the release explained.
26 August 2016, 14:06 GMT
The discovery of this object pushes back the formation time of galaxy clusters — the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity — by about 700 million years, the release noted.
The cluster’s distance of 11.1 billion light years from Earth means that the activity observed today took place more than 11 billion years ago.
The cluster was observed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes shortly after birth, a brief, but important stage of evolution never seen before, according to the release.
