Astronomy, Astrophysics: India
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Saraswati, supercluster of galaxies
2017, the discovery
Ardhra Nair|Desis find giant galaxy cluster|Jul 15 2017 : The Times of India (Delhi)
A team of Indian astrono mers claims to have dis covered an extremely large supercluster of galaxies -with a mass roughly equivalent to that of 20 million billion suns -which they have named `Saraswati'. “This is a very high concentration of galaxies in the universe and it is very rare.Few such structures have been observed till now and this is definitely a first from India,“ said the study's co-author Shishir Sankhyayan of IISER. According to the Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), superclusters are the largest coherent structures in the cosmic web. They are a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters, bound by gravity, the IUCAA added. Saraswati is one of the largest known structures in the universe, 4,000 million light years from Earth and roughly over 10 billion years old, IUCAA said.
The supercluster was discovered by Sankhyanan; Joydeep Bagchi, a faculty member of IUCCA; Prakash Sarkar of the National Institute of Technology , Jamshedpur; Somak Raychaudhury , director, IUCAA; Joe Jacob of Newman College, Kerala; and Pratik Dabhade, IUCAA research fellow. Their findings were published in the latest issue of `The Astrophysical Journal'.
Sankhyayan said the supercluster extended over 600 million light years and may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.
