UCI finds three galaxies

UCI scientist Jeff Cooke probably didn’t know how right he was when he nicknamed his latest observation “Golden Boy.”

Atop Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano, above distractions and clouds, the Keck Telescope gives Cooke, a post-grad researcher, an unprecedented look into space, and apparently, back in time.

Cooke discovered a cluster of galaxies 11.4 billion light years away from Earth — the farthest away from our planet ever discovered, university officials announced Monday.

Using a four-hour long exposure aimed at the stars, Cooke was able to see objects in deep space that emit even the faintest of lights.

As the appropriately nicknamed observation shows, what Cooke found was one-of-a-kind.

“This guy just seems unusually bright, I just thought, ‘Wow,’” he said. “What’s cool about this is it’s really far. You’re catching them in this state where they’re merging and making that [cluster] is necessary to understand the whole picture.”

It turns out what he thought was just a bright galaxy was actually three medium-sized galaxies and possibly two more in the midst of smashing into each other — the early stages of large galaxy clusters.

The discovery allows scientists to literally look back in time to the universe’s infancy.

A light year is the distance it would take a beam of light to travel in a year. Because light takes so long to reach Earth from such great distances, the first images of the galaxy cluster are from 11.4 billion years ago.

The previous, farthest known galaxy cluster sighting was 9 billion light years away. Cooke made the discovery two years ago, but he and his fellow researchers didn’t realize what they had until May 2007.

A cluster can be a grouping of hundreds to thousands of galaxies near each other, Cooke said. While older groupings have been spotted, never have they been seen at this stage of formation, he said.

Scientists estimate the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and observing a galaxy demolition-derby soon after that gives experts insight into how the universe formed, he said.

“It’s so violent. These things are just gas flying everywhere, stars crashing into each other. It’s cataclysmic,” he said. “11.4 billion years ago was well before the Earth was even here. It’s a nice snapshot of what just happened right away.”

Cooke said he hopes to eventually reserve time with the Hubble Space Telescope for even more detailed observations. The galaxy proto-cluster was named LBG-2377 and is reported in the online bulletin Astro-Ph, https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.3808. Elizabeth Barton, James Bullock, Kyle Steward and Arthur Wolfe also contributed to the research.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.