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Scientists have discovered a primitive "supercluster" of galaxies forming in the early Universe, just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.
The structure, nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive to be found in the formation of the Universe, which sprang into existence around 13.7 billion years ago.
Its titanic mass is one million trillion times that of the Sun.
"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, a researcher at the Astrophysics and Space Sciences Observatory in Bologna and lead author of a study detailing the discovery.
Redshift is a measure of the changing wavelength of light traveling away from an observer.
Cucciati said: "Normally these kinds of structures are known to lower redshifts, which means that the universe has had much more to do with evolve and construct such huge things.
Located in the constellation of Sextans, Hyperion was identified by the VIMOS Ultra-deep Survey, which provides a unique 3D map of how more than 10,000 galaxies are distributed in the distant Universe.
Hyperion is a supercluster, but it has a very different architecture, the researchers said.
The findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"Superclusters closer to Earth," explains co-author Brian Lemaux, an astronomer from the University of California at Davis.
"But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs populated by loose associations of galaxies."
This report is most likely to have a significant impact on the size of the region.
Over time, Hyperion will likely evolve into something like the Virgo Supercluster, which contains our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
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