Monster 'El Gordo' Galaxy cluster

The "El Gordo" Cluster of several hundred galaxies is one of the largest and oldest known clusters in the earlier universe, at 7 billion light years distant.  With the impressive shockwaves observed on the outskirts of the galaxy cluster, El Gordo appears to be a titanic collision between a pair of galaxy clusters, like seeing glowing cannonballs hit each other. A team of astronomers, using NASA's Hubble and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, plus ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile has calculated the cluster's mass to be as much as 3 million billion times the mass of our sun, and is more massive than earlier estimates.  Karen Ng will discuss the latest findings about El Gordo from her team at UC Davis using data from the three Observatories.

Speaker: Karen Yin-Yee Ng, UC Davis