Chilean scientists unveil galaxy clusters "A Cosmic Titan"

Astronomers observing billions of light-years away in space have detected the largest collection of galaxies ever recorded in the early days of the universe, a "proto-supercluster" that they nicknamed Hyperion after a titan of Greek mythology.

Hyperion has a mass 1 million billion times greater than the sun and is so far apart that it is seen from Earth billions of years ago.

"Hyperion, it's like 5,000 galaxies of the Milky Way," said astronomer Steffen Miefke, chief operating officer of the European Southern Observatory, to Reuters. ESO operates the very large telescope (VLT) in Chile, which has detected Hyperion.

The research, titled "The offspring of a cosmic titan," will appear in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Hyperion is a teenager in terms of astronomy. Its distance from the Earth means that astronomers see it because it was created a little over 2 billion years after the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe there are about 13, 8 billion years old.

"These are galaxies very far from us, almost at the beginning of the universe and allow us to better understand how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang to the present day," Miefke said.

"Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It's as if we could have watched the adolescence of an 80-year-old human being. "

The galaxy of the Milky Way, which hosts our solar system, dates from about 13.6 billion years ago.

Hyperion was detected using the visible multi-object spectrograph, which, according to its managers, acts as a "time machine in the middle of the desert, showing us what the universe looked like while 39, he was barely a third of his current age.

The spectrograph is hosted by the very large telescope based in Chile. The discovery was made by a team led by Olga Cucciati of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy.

The telescope is located in the Chilean desert, 30 km north of the capital Santiago.

Brian Lemaux, astronomer of the University of California at Davis, co-author of the report, said the galaxies were becoming denser as gravity acted on them for billions of years.

"Superamasiers closer to Earth tend to appear as a much more concentrated mass distribution with clear structural features," said Lemaux. "But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more evenly across a series of connected blobs, peopled with loose associations of galaxies."