EDITORIAL:

Bravo. Another feather in the cap for UCI.

And, more importantly, another discovery that enhances our understanding of the universe.

Atop Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano, UCI scientist Jeff Cooke peered into a Keck Telescope that gave the post-grad researcher a pretty deep peep into space.

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

Cooke called his discovery “Golden Boy.”

“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.”

The discovery allows scientists to look back in time to the universe’s infancy, long before Earth was formed. Prior to Cooke’s discovery, the farthest known galaxy cluster sighting was 9 billion light years away. Cooke made the discovery two years ago.

Scientists estimate the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Observing a cluster of galaxies as old as “Golden Boy” gives experts insights into how the universe formed.

Cooke is right. The discovery is “cool.”

It’s also cool that “Golden Boy” was spied by the eyes of a researcher who works for a university in our back yard. What a thing to ponder: a connection between Orange County and three galaxies — smashing into each other, the early stage of large galaxy clusters — 11.4 billion light years away.

Who knows? Maybe the universe is trying to tell us — right here in Newport-Mesa — something about ourselves. Maybe the more we understand it, the more we understand ourselves.

Keep it up, Cooke.

Keep it up, UCI.

And bravo.