Two telescope facilities on Mauna Kea recently played a key role in the discovery of a gargantuan galactic cluster unlike any previously known.

Galaxy cluster SpARCS1049+56 was first detected by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. It was confirmed using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.

The SpARCS1049+56 cluster is so far away that its light took 9.8 billion years to reach Earth. It houses at least 27 galaxies and has a combined mass equal to 400 trillion suns.

A galactic cluster is a vast collection of galaxies bound together by gravity. At the center of these clusters are so-called stellar fossils — old, red or dead stars.

As follow-up observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope have discovered, however, the newly discovered cluster does not fit the profile.

According to a new study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the large galaxy at the center of SpARCS1049+56 is surprisingly active, producing new stars faster than all the talent agencies in Hollywood combined.

“We think the giant galaxy at the center of this cluster is furiously making new stars after merging with a smaller galaxy,” said co-author Tracy Webb of McGill University in Montreal.

The cluster’s brightest galaxy is creating approximately 800 new stars per year. The Milky Way galaxy — which resides within a small galactic group known as the Local Group, part of the Laniakea supercluster — produces no more than two new stars per year.

Hubble data suggests that a smaller galaxy recently merged with the large galaxy in the middle of the cluster, lending its gas to the larger galaxy and initiating the rapid production of new stars.

“Hubble found a trainwreck of a merger at the centre of this cluster,” said co-author Adam Muzzin of the University of Cambridge in a statement Sept. 10.

Muzzin said the team found evidence of “wet merger,” a process in which gas-rich galaxies collide and gas is quickly converted into new stars.

According to the study, the new discovery is one of the first known cases of a wet merger at the core of a galaxy cluster.