El Gordo galaxy cluster as hefty as 3 million billion suns

The galaxy cluster El Gordo, which is Spanish for “the fat one,” is roughly 43 percent more massive than earlier estimates, Hubble data show.

Astronomers made the new mass estimate by watching how strongly the gravity of the galaxy cluster distorted the light of objects behind it. El Gordo, which is 9.7 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, had enough pull to weigh in at as much as 3 million billion times the mass of the sun. It is the largest known galaxy cluster in the distant universe.