October 19, 2018

The Hyperion proto-supercluster (Image ESO/L. Calçada & Olga Cucciati et al.)

An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the discovery of a huge galaxy proto-supercluster with a mass close to that of the largest existing structures in the recent universe. A team led by Olga Cucciati of the Italian Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna discovered it thanks to the data collected by the VUDS (VIMOSUltra-Deep Survey) project and named it Hyperion after the titan because it’s really titanic. the researchers estimated that this structure dates back about 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang, the largest and most massive discovered dating back to such a remote era with a mass estimated at over a million billion times the Sun’s.