MASSACHUSETTS: An MIT-led team of scientists announced the startling detection of the biggest structure in the Universe - the Phoenix galaxy cluster.

Located 7 billion light years away, the enormous cluster of galaxies is bound together by gravity.
It measures about 7.3 million light years across, contains 3 trillion stars and has a mass of 2500 trillion times the mass of our Sun.

Michael McDonald of MIT, lead author of the study describing Phoenix's remarkable properties, told "The record-holder, 'El Gordo,' is slightly more massive, but the uncertainty in this estimate is high - it could turn out that with more careful measurements, Phoenix is more massive."

Phoenix was first noticed in 2010 by the 10-meter South Pole Telescope in Antarctica.
Researchers deemed it another exciting entity for study.

McDonald and his colleagues recently used the space-based Chandra X-Ray Observatory to study the most massive clusters identified by the South Pole Telescope. Immediately, the Phoenix cluster stood out in the X-ray data as the brightest of the clusters - a finding that prompted McDonald to follow up with more observations of the cluster from more telescopes.

The team ultimately acquired images of the Phoenix cluster from 10 different telescopes in space and on the ground around the world. Each telescope observed the cluster at different wavelengths, illuminating different features of it.

"The central black hole is very bright in the X-ray, but the star formation is very bright in the optical and ultraviolet," McDonald says. "So you need to work together with all these different telescopes to get a complete view."

The Phoenix cluster also breaks the record for being the brightest cluster in the X-ray radiation spectrum. The gas in the cluster is about 200 million degrees F.

The black hole at the center of Phoenix is estimated to have about 10 billion times the mass of Sun, making it the biggest black hole discovered so far.