Discovery of a massive X-ray luminous galaxy cluster at z=1.579

Understand

We report on the discovery of a very distant galaxy cluster serendipitously detected in the archive of the XMM-Newton mission, within the scope of the XMM-Newton Distant Cluster Project (XDCP).

• XMMUJ0044.0-2033 was detected at a high significance level (5sigma) as a compact, but significantly extended source in the X-ray data, with a soft-band flux f(r<40&#34;)=(1.5+-0.3)x10^(-14) erg/s/cm2.
• Optical/NIR follow-up observations confirmed the presence of an overdensity of red galaxies matching the X-ray emission.
• The cluster was spectroscopically confirmed to be at z=1.579 using ground-based VLT/FORS2 spectroscopy.