EYE ON THE SKY

A glimpse back in time to the dawn of the Universe reveals a massive proto-supercluster that could give us clues about how our own Virgo supercluster evolved

Because light takes time to travel across space, astronomers can effectively look back in time by observing ever deeper into the cosmos to see objects as they existed in the Universe’s infancy. Hyperion – the object seen here – appears as it did about 12 billion years ago, two billion years after the Big Bang.

This object is known as a galaxy proto super cluster and is the largest and most massive structure ever observed so distant and early in the history of the Universe. It consists of galaxies held together in a cluster, forming an object whose mass is equal to over one million billion times that of our Sun.

It is thought that Hyperion will eventually evolve into something like the Virgo Supercluster in which our own Galaxy is found, so studying this object and comparing it with others closer to us in the local Universe can reveal clues as to how the cosmos formed and evolved over time.