Largest galaxy cluster in early universe found

Astronomers have discovered the largest and most massive galaxy super cluster yet found in the early universe, just over two billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy proto-supercluster, nicknamed Hyperion, was identified using the VIMOS instrument on European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile, said researchers from the University of California, Davis in the US.

Hyperion has a calculated mass more than one million billion times that of the Sun, making it the largest and most massive structure to be found so early in the formation of the universe, they said. “This is the first time that such a large structure has been identified at such a high redshift, just over two billion years after the Big Bang,” said Olga Cucciati of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy.

“Normally these kinds of structures are known at lower redshifts, which means when the universe has had much more time to evolve and construct such huge things. It was a surprise to see something like this evolved when the universe was relatively young,” Cucciati said. Located in the constellation of Sextans, Hyperion was identified by a novel technique to analyse the vast amount of data obtained from the VIMOS Ultra-Deep Survey.

“Superclusters closer to Earth tend to be a much more concentrated distribution of mass with clear structural features,” said Brian Lemaux from the University of California, Davis. “But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs, populated by loose associations of galaxies,” Lemaux said.