{"id":21740,"date":"2017-07-14T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2017-07-14T11:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/?p=21740"},"modified":"2017-07-14T17:06:48","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T11:36:48","slug":"indian-astronomers-discover-supercluster-galaxies-name-saraswati","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/india-news\/indian-astronomers-discover-supercluster-galaxies-name-saraswati\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian astronomers discover a supercluster of galaxies, name it Saraswati"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A team of Indian astronomers have identified an extremely large supercluster of galaxies and have named it Saraswati.<\/p>\n
This previously unknown, extremely large supercluster of galaxies, was discovered by a team of astronomers from the Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA), and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), both in Pune, India, and members of two other Indian universities. The team was led by Joydeep Bagchi from IUCAA, while others included Shishir Sankhyayan, a PhD student at IISER, Pratik Dabhade, an IUCAA research fellow, Joe Jacob of the Newman College, Kerala, and Prakash Sarkar of the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.<\/p>\n
The discovery comes close on the heels of another, reported on July 1, of \u201ca large sample of giant radio galaxies\u201d by the same institution. A six-member team of Indian astronomers led by Pratik Dabhade from IUCAA had reported the discovery of 25 extremely rare kind of galaxies called giant radio galaxies (GRGs), known to be the largest known galaxies in the universe. Bagchi was also part of the team.<\/p>\n
Saraswati supercluster, located in the direction of constellation Pisces, is one of the largest known structures in the nearby Universe, and is at a distance of 4,000 million (400 crore) light-years away from us. Our own galaxy is part of a Supercluster called the Laniakea Supercluster, announced in 2014 by Brent Tully at the University of Hawaii and collaborators.<\/p>\n
Superclusters are the largest coherent structures in the Cosmic Web. A Supercluster is a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters, bound by gravity, often stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies. The newly discovered \u2018Saraswati\u2019 supercluster, for instance, extends over a scale of 600 million light-years and may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns. \\<\/p>\n
The Saraswati supercluster has a total of 43 clusters of galaxies. The typical size of a galaxy here is around 250,000 light years.<\/p>\n