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A new cosmic crowd has captured the distance and heavyweight titles for galaxy clusters discovered deep in the universe. The record-breaker sits billions of light-years from Earth and weighs about a thousand times the mass of the Milky Way, astronomers report in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“To discover a cluster that is so distant yet so big was quite lucky,” says study coauthor Georg Lamer of the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam in Germany.
Lamer and his Potsdam colleagues first spotted the massive cluster, dubbed 2XMM J083026+524133, when scrutinizing data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope. In 2001,the X-ray satellite captured the cluster’s signature while imaging a distant, active galaxy. Surveying the satellite’s catalogue earlier this year for nearby galaxies and distant clusters, the team was startled that the new cluster’s X-ray signal had been overlooked.