09/08/2026
A team of astronomers have discovered the most distant proto-supercluster ever found 🤯
This colossal structure lies around 11 billion light-years away, meaning it formed when the Universe was relatively young.
Known as COSMOS-z3.1-A, this enormous ancestor to a “cluster of clusters” of galaxies has a mass equivalent to about 5,000 Milky Ways. It’s also incredibly rare. Researchers estimate that there may be fewer than one like it for every 10,000 galaxy clusters.
The protocluster was discovered in data from the One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) survey, conducted with the DOE-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
But a 2D image only tells you where galaxies appear in the sky. To understand how they are arranged in space, the team used a variety of instruments called spectrographs to determine how far away each galaxy is and map them in 3D.
This included the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), mounted on the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini Observatory South telescope in Chile, and the DEep Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS) on the Keck II telescope located on Maunakea in Hawai‘i.
The resulting 3D view revealed something remarkable: these ancient galaxies are arranged in clumps at the intersection of multiple filaments in the cosmic web, the vast network of matter that connects structures across the Universe.
The team predicts that these irregular clumps will eventually coalesce into a massive galaxy cluster that resembles the smoother, rounder clusters we see in the nearby Universe today, supporting existing theories of how galaxy clusters evolve.
Read more: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2622/
📷 CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab)
