Excerpt
A distant galaxy cluster was spawned by a huge cosmic smash-up of four different clusters, which lasted hundreds of millions of years, a new study suggests.
A team of scientists pieced together the violent history of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's Cluster, using several different telescopes in space and on the ground. Abell 2744 seems to be the result of a merger of four separate clusters that took place over a period of 350 million years, researchers said.
"We nicknamed it Pandora’s Cluster because so many different and strange phenomena were unleashed by the collision," said study author Renato Dupke, of the University of Michigan, in a statement. "Some of these phenomena had never been seen before."
A huge, distant cluster
Galaxy clusters — groupings of hundreds of individual galaxies — are the largest structures in the universe bound together by gravity. Abell 2744 is located a little more than 3 billion light-years away from our own Milky Way.
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