The heavyweight champion of the Cosmos
By Dr. Ethan Siegel
As crazy as it once seemed, we once assumed that the Earth was the largest thing in all the universe. 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was ridiculed for suggesting that the Sun might be even larger than the Peloponnesus peninsula, about 16% of modern-day Greece. Today, we know that planets are dwarfed by stars, which themselves are bound together by the billions or even trillions into galaxies.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (UC Davis), J. Hughes (Rutgers U.), F. Menanteau (Rutgers U. and UIUC), C. Sifon (Leiden Observatory), R. Mandelbum (Carnegie Mellon U.), L. Barrientos (Universidad Catolica de Chile), and K. Ng (UC Davis). X-rays are shown in pink from Chandra; the overall matter density is shown in blue, from lensing derived from the Hubble space telescope. 10 billion light-years distant, El Gordo is the most massive galaxy cluster ever found.
But gravitationally bound structures extend far beyond galaxies, which themselves can bind together into massive clusters across the cosmos. While dark energy may be driving most galaxy clusters apart from one another, preventing our local group from falling into the Virgo Cluster, for example, on occasion, huge galaxy clusters can merge, forming the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe.
Take the "El Gordo" galaxy cluster, catalogued as ACT-CL J0102-4915. It’s the largest known galaxy cluster in the distant universe. A galaxy like the Milky Way might contain a few hundred billion stars and up to just over a trillion (1012) solar masses worth of matter, the El Gordo cluster has an estimated mass of 3 × 1015 solar masses, or 3,000 times as much as our own galaxy! The way we've figured this out is fascinating. By seeing how the shapes of background galaxies are distorted into more elliptical-than-average shapes along a particular set of axes, we can reconstruct how much mass is present in the cluster: a phenomenon known as weak gravitational lensing.
That reconstruction is shown in blue, but doesn't match up with where the X-rays are, which are shown in pink! This is because, when galaxy clusters collide, the neutral gas inside heats up to emit X-rays, but the individual galaxies (mostly) and dark matter (completely) pass through one another, resulting in a displacement of the cluster's mass from its center. This has been observed before in objects like the Bullet Cluster, but El Gordo is much younger and farther away. At 10 billion light-years distant, the light reaching us now was emitted more than 7 billion years ago, when the universe was less than half its present age.
It's a good thing, too, because about 6 billion years ago, the universe began accelerating, meaning that El Gordo just might be the largest cosmic heavyweight of all. There's still more universe left to explore, but for right now, this is the heavyweight champion of the distant universe!.
Learn more about "El Gordo" here. El Gordo is certainly huge, but what about really tiny galaxies? Kids can learn about satellite galaxies at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/satellite-galaxies/.