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Scientists have recently discovered the largest known structure of the ancient universe.
This is an object called a supercluster, which is not as foreign as it may seem. We also live in a supercluster. If space seems lonely to dark nights, remember that the Earth is in the middle of a galactic abundant company. The house of the sun, the Milky Way, is a galaxy among so many in its cosmic neighborhood. And the galaxy of the Milky Way is part of a gathering of nearby galaxies called the Virgin's supercluster, which is part of a larger supercluster called Laniakea (which translates to "immeasurable heavens" in Hawaiian). ).
These structures are usually found when scientists are looking at the weakest red offsets. In general, red offsets are a measure of the extent of the light of an object when it is moving away from us. Astronomers use redshift to assess how long the light has left its source; because the universe is expanding, less light shows redshift, later in the history of the universe, the light initially left its source.
Structures identified at lower red offsets are contemporary cosmic. But at higher red offsets, an object is determined to be much older.
The Hyperion protocol is only 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang. An international team of astronomers led by Olga Cucciati has scanned the data from the VIMOS instrument of the very large ESO telescope and discovered this colossal structure from the beginning of the universe.
Credit: L. Calçada and Olga Cucciati et al./ESO
An astronomical team led by Olga Cucciati of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, discovered a massive supercluster from the beginning of the universe. This proto-super-cluster, which the Cucciati team has dubbed "Hyperion", is "the largest and most massive structure ever found at a time and distance so far – barely $ 2 billion. 39 years after the Big Bang, "according to a statement released today (October 17) from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The team discovered this gigantic structure by analyzing existing data from the VIMOS instrument on the ESO's very large telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope observations on the Big Island. # 39; Hawaii.
The team discovered that Hyperion had a massive mass of a million billion times greater than that of the Earth's sun.
This wide-field, visible-light image of the region surrounding the COSMOS field was created from photographs taken through red and blue filters and is part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. It's in this field (the blue box) that the proto-superamas "Hyperion" was discovered.
Credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.
"It's the first time that such a structure is identified with such a high redshift, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang," Cucciati said in a statement. "Normally, these types of structures are known to have the lowest red offsets, which means [they come from a time] when the universe has had a lot more time to evolve and build such huge things. It was a surprise to see something that evolved when the universe was relatively young! "
Hyperion is located in the constellation Sextans (the sextant).
An article detailing the study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in September.
Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter@salazar_elin. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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