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(CNN) –
An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a huge and surprising structure, formed early enough in the life of the universe. This structure is a "supercluster" of galaxies, created when many galaxies are linked together by the force of gravity. Conceptually, you can imagine it resembling a swarm of bees, albeit on a cosmic scale, and each bee being replaced by a galaxy full of hundreds of billions of stars.
This superamas is both old and incredibly big for its age. It's called Hyperion after a titan of Greek mythology and comprises about the same amount of mass as five thousand galaxies the size of our own Milky Way.
Hyperion is not only big in terms of mass, he is also very tall physically. Basically, you can imagine it as a cylinder about 200 million light-years away from the circular ends, and about 500 million light-years away. For comparison, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which has about 200 billion stars, is only about 100,000 light-years away.
Superclusters are not so unusual; astronomers know a lot of them. What distinguishes Hyperion from others is that it is old. The universe is about 14 billion years old, barely two billion years less than Hyperion, which in cosmic time is a nod to the eye.
And it's a peculiarity.
It turns out that these structures are very similar to people: they start modestly and grow over time. When the universe was very young, galaxies were generally much smaller. Over time, small galaxies collided and merged, giving larger galaxies. At the same time, and at much larger scales, these large galaxies have come closer to each other by the force of gravity, assembling into clusters and superclusters.
It is not uncommon to find superclusters of galaxies closer to Earth than Hyperion. Because we use light to see astronomical objects and light has a finite speed, the objects closest to Earth are younger – in the order of a few hundred million or a billion. d & # 39; years.
However, the Hyperion supercluster existed about 12 billion years ago. And it is amazing to see such a vast assemblage of matter so early in the history of the universe. On a human scale, it's a bit like looking at a daycare where you expect to see only toddlers and see a 2-year-old child who already has the height of an adult.
In addition to its size, Hyperion is an unusual supercluster in terms of the density of its galaxies. It's a bit more diffuse than modern superclusters that have a relatively compact structure, with small groups of galaxies grouped together.
And it is an important point from an astronomical point of view. Remember that we do not see Hyperion as it currently exists. We see it as it existed 12 billion years ago. If we could see it as it currently exists, it would probably look more like more modern superclusters, located closer to the Earth. By extension, it is probably true that Hyperion gives us a glimpse of what superamas in the distant past looked like.
In a very real sense, Hyperion helps us understand how some of the largest structures in the universe have been assembled. It is perhaps easier to think that galaxies spread throughout the universe look a little like the moss of a pint of freshly drawn Guinness beer. Look at it from afar, and it's uniform. But look closer and you see the individual bubbles – small empty spheres of liquid in the middle.
The universe is similar, with galaxies evenly distributed on average – but if you take a closer look, you'll see galaxies clustered in what are called walls and filaments, surrounding vast voids in which little galaxies exist. These filaments are made of superclusters.
So now we have a glimpse of the moment in the history of the universe where these filaments and voids began to form – when large-scale structures began to exist.
All parents remember when they observed their child and saw the adult that they were going to become. With the Hyperion supercluster watching, we are doing it now for the universe as a whole.
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