Image copyright NRAO/AUI/NSF/S. Dagnello Image caption An artist's impression of the 14 galaxies detected

Scientists have detected a cosmic "pileup" of galaxies in the early Universe.

Imaged almost at the boundary of the observable Universe, the 14 unusually bright objects are on a collision course, set to form one massive galaxy.

This will in turn serve as the core for a galaxy cluster, one of the most massive objects in the Universe.

The catch? This all happened over 12 billion years ago.

Looking this far across the Universe is essentially looking back in time, as the light has taken many billions of years to reach us.

The galaxies would have been in their observed configuration when the Universe was a mere 1.4 billion years old.

Image copyright ALMA; B. Saxton Image caption The galaxies are set to collide and merge

Originally detected in a wide sky survey using the South Pole Telescope, the objects surprised astronomers as they were clustered so close together.

"We found it originally as a bright point source in the survey," explained Yale University's Tim Miller, an author on the study published in Nature.

"I don't think we were expecting something quite this spectacular but we knew it had to be exciting."

Star nurseries

Known as starburst galaxies, the objects are extremely bright as they are forming stars at a high rate - up to 1,000 times as fast as the Milky Way.

Professor Caitlin Casey, who was not involved in the study, described the findings as "extremely unusual."

"We often get excited when we find just two galaxies like this grouped together, because each one is already quite unusual and rare compared to 'normal galaxies', forming stars several hundreds or thousands of times faster than the Milky Way. To find fourteen such starbursts all grouped together is unheard of," the University of Texas at Austin researcher commented.

Image copyright ESA/Hubble Image caption Starburst galaxies like NGC 1569 are regions of accelerated star birth

Crowded neighbourhood

The group occupy a region of space just four or five times the size of the Milky Way, making it incredibly dense.

"If you put all the planets into the orbit between the Earth and Moon, it's the same sort of scale of mass concentration," explained Dr Axel Weiß, a co-author on the study.

The question of why such a concentration of galaxies was able to evolve in this location, and so early in the Universe's history, remains unanswered for now.

"This is just so early. This is before the peak of star formation," says Miller.

Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption About one star forms every year in the Milky Way

A long way to here

So what have these galaxies gotten up to in the intervening billions of years?

By now, models predict that they would have coalesced to form the core of an even more massive cluster.

Miller explains that in the present day, astronomers expect the structure would be as massive as the Coma Cluster.

Stretching across two degrees of the night sky, or over four times the visible space occupied by the full moon, the Coma Cluster is truly a giant.

"The uniqueness of the Coma Cluster is it's one of the most massive structures we know about in the whole local Universe. [It has about] 10,000 billion solar masses. It's the most extreme structure that we know about," explained Dr Weiß.

Thus far, very few of these large galaxy clusters have been detected, but work continues on further candidates.

Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption The Coma Cluster contains over 1,000 galaxies

Dr Weiß, who was involved in another study which revealed a similar cluster of ten galaxies, says that there are some other candidates.

"[Though] these are certainly the most extreme ones," said the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy scientist.

Dr Amy Barger, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found the work to be "ground-breaking."

"Finding the progenitors of present-day massive clusters has always been of great importance for piecing together when and how structure grows in the Universe," she told BBC News.</s>HALIFAX - Astronomers have discovered the beginnings of what they say is a gigantic cosmic pileup that could someday form one of the largest structures in the universe.

The team of Canadian and international scientists say they used a powerful telescope to detect the "impending collision of 14 young, starbursting galaxies" that will become a massive galaxy cluster.

The research, published in the journal Nature, says the so-called protocluster or group of galaxies is 12.4 billion light years away — suggesting its light began travelling to Earth when the universe was 1.4 billion years old.

One of the researchers, astrophysicist Scott Chapman of Dalhousie University, says the discovery challenges conventional understanding of how structures form in the universe since it happened so quickly and in a space only about three times the size of the Milky Way.

Until now, astronomers had theorized that protoclusters as large as this one would have taken much longer to form.</s>Astronomers have witnessed the beginnings of a huge cosmic pileup that may have created a mega-galaxy.

The discovery was made using the world’s most powerful telescopes to peer 90 per cent of the way across the observable universe.

Here, scientists found a tightly bound galactic smashup, known as a protocluster.

The protocluser is 12.4 billion light-years away and its light started traveling to us when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old.

Calculations suggest that by the present day, hundreds more galaxies would have been eaten up by the cluster.

It could have a mass equivalent to 1,000 trillion suns, which would make a galaxy that is the largest known object in the universe.

Astronomers believe there are at least 14 galaxies packed into an area only four times the diameter of the Milky Way’s galactic disk.

Its individual galaxies are forming stars as much as 1,000 times faster than our home galaxy.

The resulting galaxy cluster will rival some of the most massive clusters we see in the universe today.

This extreme level of congestion and star birth rate is unprecedented.

'[It] seems like we're catching a cluster in the process of being assembled,' says study co-author Chris Hayward, an associate research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City.

'This is the missing link in our understanding of how clusters form.'

Using mathematical models based on real observations, an international team of scientists has been able to predict the cluster's movement.

However, how the assembly of galaxies became so big so fast 'is a bit of a mystery,' says study co-author Scott Chapman, Professor in astrophysics at Dalhousie University.

'It wasn't built up gradually over billions of years, as you might expect,' explains Tim Miller, a PhD candidate at Yale University and lead author of one of the papers.

'This discovery provides an incredible opportunity to study how galaxy clusters and their massive galaxies came together in these extreme environments.'

Current theoretical and computer models suggest that protoclusters as massive as this one should have taken much longer to evolve.

Astronomers previously thought that these events occurred around three billion years after the Big Bang.

When they realised they were occurring at half that age, scientists rushed to find a new explanation.

'Having caught a massive galaxy cluster in throes of formation is spectacular in and of itself,' said Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

'But, the fact that this is happening so early in the history of the universe poses a formidable challenge to our present-day understanding of the way structures form in the universe,' he said.

The galaxy cluster was first spotted using the South Pole telescope and the Herschel space observatory.

Astronomers then used the Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma), a telescope comprising 66 antennas spread over in the Chilean Andes, to make more observations.

After a follow-up with the high-powered Chilean telescopes, the number of baby galaxies seen in the distant cloud rapidly increased.

'It just hit you in the face because all of a sudden there are all these galaxies there,' Dr Chapman says.

'We went from three to 14 in one fell swoop. It instantly became obvious this was a very interesting, massive structure forming and not just a flash in the pan.'</s>Center of Milky Way may have thousands of black holes, study says

New detailed 3D map of Milky Way to 'revolutionize astronomy'

Astronomers have detected the early stages of a colossal cosmic collision, observing a pile-up of 14 galaxies 90 percent of the way across the observable universe in a discovery that upends assumptions about the early history of the cosmos.

Researchers said on Wednesday the galactic mega-merger observed 12.4 billion light-years away from Earth occurred 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe. Astronomers call the object a galactic protocluster, a precursor to the type of enormous galaxy clusters that are the largest-known objects in today's universe.

It marked the first time scientists observed the birth of a galaxy cluster, with at least 14 galaxies crammed into an area only about four times the size of our average-sized Milky Way galaxy.

A protocluster as massive as the one observed here, designated as SPT2349-56, should not have existed at that time, according to current notions of the early universe. Scientists had figured this could not happen until several billion of years later.

"We were staggered by the implications," said astrophysicist Scott Chapman of Dalhousie University in Canada. "Yes, conventional wisdom was that clusters take a lot longer to build up and assemble. SPT2349 shows us it happened much more rapidly and explosively than simulations or theory suggested."

Galaxy clusters can have thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity that can boast total masses a quadrillion larger than our sun, with immense amounts of the enigmatic material called dark matter, gigantic black holes and super-heated gas.

SPT2349's mass is about 10 trillion times larger than our sun.

The galaxies within SPT2349 were producing stars at a remarkable clip, up to a thousand times the Milky Way's star-formation rate.

In observing objects so distant, astronomers are peering back in history because of the length of time light takes to travel. SPT2349-56 appeared when the universe was about a tenth its current age.

"This result is exciting as it allows us to directly study the formation of a massive galaxy cluster in the early universe," Yale University astronomer Tim Miller added.

The researchers, who studied SPT2349 using land-based telescopes in Chile, said it most likely has snowballed in size since 12.4 billion years ago and could be among the largest structures in the cosmos today.

The research was published in the journal Nature.</s>HALIFAX -- Astronomers have discovered the beginnings of a gigantic "cosmic pileup" in the far reaches of the universe that has never been seen before and could form one of the largest structures in the cosmos.

The team of Canadian and international scientists used a powerful telescope in Chile to make the startling finding that involves the "impending collision of 14 young, starbursting galaxies" that will become a massive galaxy cluster.

The research, published in the journal Nature, says the so-called protocluster or group of galaxies is 12.4 billion light years away -- suggesting its light began travelling to Earth when the universe was 1.4 billion years old.

"Having caught a massive galaxy cluster in throes of formation is spectacular in and of itself," researcher Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said in a release.

"But, the fact that this is happening so early in the history of the universe poses a formidable challenge to our present-day understanding of the way structures form in the universe."

Chapman said up until now, astronomers had theorized that protoclusters as large as this one would have taken much longer to form. But this formation upended that thinking because it happened quickly and in a space only about three times the size of the Milky Way, he said.

Galaxy clusters are thought to be the largest objects in the known universe, with masses comparable to a million billion suns, the study says. They are bound together by gravity and can contain a thousand galaxies, dark matter, expansive black holes and gas that can reach over a million degrees in temperature.

The paper's authors say the discovery could shed light on how galaxy clusters form in environments characterized by hot, ionized gas.

"How this assembly of galaxies got so big so fast is a bit of a mystery -- it wasn't built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect," said Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and co-author of the paper.

"This discovery provides an incredible opportunity to study how galaxy clusters and their massive galaxies came together in these extreme environments."

The galactic cluster -- dubbed SPT2349-56 -- was first seen as a smudge of light in 2010 by the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica. That led scientists to follow up with the ALMA telescope, ultimately determining that the smudge was 14 galaxies located 90 per cent of the way across the observable universe.

The researchers found its energetic individual galaxies are forming stars up to 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.</s>HALIFAX — Astronomers have discovered the beginnings of a gigantic “cosmic pileup” in the far reaches of the universe, which could form one of the largest structures in the cosmos.

The team of Canadian and international scientists used a powerful telescope in Chile to spot the “impending collision of 14 young, starbursting galaxies” that will become a massive galaxy cluster.

The research, published in the journal Nature, says the so-called protocluster or group of galaxies is 12.4 billion light years away — suggesting its light began travelling to Earth when the universe was 1.4 billion years old.

“Having caught a massive galaxy cluster in throes of formation is spectacular in and of itself,” researcher Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said in a statement..

“But, the fact that this is happening so early in the history of the universe poses a formidable challenge to our present-day understanding of the way structures form in the universe.”

Chapman said until now, astronomers had theorized that protoclusters as large as this one would have taken much longer to form. But this formation has upended that thinking because it happened quickly and in a space only about three times the size of the Milky Way, he said.

Galaxy clusters are thought to be the largest objects in the known universe, with masses comparable to a million billion suns, the study says. They are bound together by gravity and can contain a thousand galaxies, dark matter, expansive black holes and extremely hot gas.

The clusters are considered rare and can have typical separations of 600 million light years.

“The distance to the closest big cluster (Coma) is 300 million light years, so we live in a relatively unpopulated region of the Universe,” said Chapman.

The paper’s authors say the discovery could shed light on how galaxy clusters form in environments characterized by hot, ionized gas.

“How this assembly of galaxies got so big so fast is a bit of a mystery — it wasn’t built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect,” said Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and co-author of the paper.

“This discovery provides an incredible opportunity to study how galaxy clusters and their massive galaxies came together in these extreme environments.”

The galactic cluster — dubbed SPT2349-56 — was first seen as a smudge of light in 2010 by the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica. That led scientists to follow up with the ALMA telescope, ultimately determining that the smudge was 14 galaxies located 90 per cent of the way across the observable universe.

“SPT2349 shows us that massive cluster formation can happen much more rapidly and explosively than simulations or theory have suggested,” Chapman said.

“The incredible energetics are like 10,000 supernova going off at a time, quite literally.”

The researchers found its energetic individual galaxies are forming stars up to 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.

“In the short term, SPT2349 affords us a wonderful shortcut — we can use SPT2349 as the initial conditions for a simulation of cluster formation and see what lessons can be learned,” said Chapman.</s>Astronomers have for the first time witnessed a colossal merger of 14 galaxies that took place more than 12 billion years ago – providing a starting point into how galaxies evolve.

In a study published in the journal Nature, a team of international scientists used computer simulations of the galaxies to predict that, over time, this massive cluster will assemble to become the biggest structure in the modern universe.

Here’s all you need to know:

So why are we just seeing this megamerger now?

This densely-packed galactic smash-up, known as a protocluster, is located approximately 12.4 billion light years away.

This means its light started travelling when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old – about a 10th of its present age – and has just reached us.

Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada – and one of the study authors, said: “Having caught a massive galaxy cluster in throes of formation is spectacular in and of itself.

“But, the fact that this is happening so early in the history of the universe poses a formidable challenge to our present-day understanding of the way structures form in the universe.”

How did the astronomers see this cosmic pile-up?

Using a powerful telescope called the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (Alma) in Chile, astronomers peered deep into space to witness the beginnings of the gargantuan merger.

The cosmic pile-up was observed “an astounding 90% of the way across the observable universe”, according to the team.

Alma allowed astronomers to identify 14 starburst galaxies undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation in a small region of space, confirming that this was a protocluster, called SPT2349-56, in very early stages of development.

Chapman said: “Alma gave us, for the first time, a clear starting point to predict the evolution of a galaxy cluster.”

So what does this all mean?

The scientists say a protocluster as massive SPT2349-56 should have taken much longer to evolve – because they are likely to contain vast amounts of dark matter and gargantuan black holes.

Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate at Yale University and co-author on the paper, said: “How this assembly of galaxies got so big so fast is a bit of a mystery, it wasn’t built up gradually over billions of years, as astronomers might expect.”

Computer simulations indicate that, over the next billion years or so, the 14 galaxies will merge into one giant elliptical galaxy surrounded stars and cosmic dust.

The researchers estimate this mega cluster will have a mass equivalent to 1,000 trillion suns, which would make it the largest known object in the universe.</s>It's something we're exposed to every day, and it could be doing serious damage to your health, even your children.We're talking about blue light.Blue light is part of the natural light spectrum, and some exposure is good for you, but Dr. Monica Ma with Parkside Eye Care in Cary said many of the problems she's seeing in patients are caused by artificial blue light from cell phones, computers, tablets and LED light bulbs."Disrupting your sleep patterns, making your eyes more dry, having blurring vision, getting headaches and overall eye strain," she explained.Since most of us can't avoid working in front of a computer screen all day, Dr. Ma says more people are turning to blue light filtering glasses for protection."I recommended it if they A: are on the computer for long periods of time and B: complain about digital eye strain."Blue light isn't just a problem for adults, think of the screen time your kids are getting, especially right before bed."Increased exposure to blue light decreases our natural melatonin and messes up our sleep cycle. So increased blue light can affect your kid's sleep, how much they're sleeping and the quality of sleep," Dr. Ma said. She also suggests children avoid screen time for at least two to three hours before they go to bed.Blue light or "computer" glasses can filter out the potentially harmful blue light. Maureen Scher is an optician who has studied the impacts of blue light for the last several years."Twenty-five years ago people weren't using computers and tablets and smartphones and certainly not the way that they are now," Scher said.Maureen showed us some of the different options available through Parkside Eye Care Center.In the image below you can see the difference between the options. The first picture has no blue-light filter on the lens, and the three other options provide different layers of protection. The one that filters out the most blue light is the BLUTECH lens which contains pigmentation on the lens giving it a tinted look. Maureen adds, "They all filter out blue light really well, but obviously the tinted, pigmented lens is going to do a little bit of a better job."Getting blue-light lenses from an optometrist can cost about $200, even if you don't have a prescription. We found options online for as low as $10. We bought two pairs from Amazon, this pair for $8.99 and this pair for $39.95. Maureen agreed to test both to see if they filter out blue light.When it comes to buying glasses online that claim to filter out blue light Maureen says any amount of protection is probably a good thing, but she has one caution for anyone considering purchasing glasses without seeing a professional, "The problem with getting them online they're not regulated by the FDA. So anything that's not regulated I can't recommend."We did reach out to both companies who sold the glasses on Amazon for comment; neither one got back to us.Kate Clark says she often suffered from migraines after a long day of work on the computer.About eight months ago, she went to the eye doctor and bought a pair of blue-light filtering glasses and couldn't be happier, "I definitely feel much more rested. I'm not having migraines anymore, so definitely worth it for me."If you don't want to spend the money on blue-light glasses, there are some other ways you can protect your eyes.Dr. Ma said to avoid screen time two to three hours before bed. If you must use a device, use a blue-light filter or "night time" option on your device. You can find that under settings on your phone or device. Also, always remember the 20-20-20 rule. For every 20 minutes of screen time, look away about 20 feet for at least 20 seconds.When it comes to the long-term health impacts of exposure to blue light, Dr. Ma said there are no long-term studies to indicate how too much exposure to blue light might impact us years from now - but she adds: "Our speculation is because our eye has natural filters for UV it does not have natural filters for blue light so it may be damaging our retina and leading to macular degeneration at a faster rate."</s>In a breakthrough for optical computing, researchers have used graphene to confine light to the smallest possible space, just one atom wide.

Confining light to small spaces is a fundamental challenge for computing using light rather than electric current. The smaller the space into which a pulse of light can be confined, the more compact a device using this technology, such as sensors or nanoscale lasers can be. Up to now, light has been confined to a space smaller than its own wavelength using the atomic lattices of metals to trap and guide photons. Now, researchers from the European Graphene Flagship, led by a team from ICFO (the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona), have found that this is yet another property that can be accessed using the single atom thick form of elemental carbon

“Graphene keeps surprising us: nobody thought that confining light to the one atom limit would be possible,” said research leader Prof Frank Koppens. In a paper published in Science, Koppens and colleagues at the University of Minho, Portugal, and MIT describe how they fabricated a composite nano-optical device starting with a layer of graphene, topped with an insulating hexagonal boron nitride layer, which was in turn topped with an array of metallic rods. Graphene is already known to have the ability to guide light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of electrons within the material structure that interact strongly with light.

“At first, we were looking for a new way to excite graphene plasmons,” said David Alcaraz Iranzo, lead author of the Science paper. “On the way, we found that the confinement was stronger than before and the additional losses minimal.” This is a step forward, because confinement using metal lattices has always led to a sharp drop in the energy of the light pulse. “So we decided to go to the one atom limit,” he continued, “with surprising results.”

The team sent infrared light through the device stack and observed that plasmon is propagated between the metal and the graphene. Reducing the thickness of hexagonal boron nitride layer to a single atom thick, they found to their surprise that the plasmons were still in an excited state – that is, the electrons were vibrating – and that this vibration could propagate freely along the single atom thick channel. This plasmon propagation could be switched on and off by applying an electric voltage, which demonstrates the ability of the channel less than 1nm thick to control the light.

“The impressive results reported in this paper are testimony to the relevance for cutting-edge science of the Flagship work,” said Prof Andrea Ferrari, chair of the Graphene Flagship management panel. “Having read the ultimate limit of light confinement could lead to new devices with unprecedented small dimensions.”

CLICK HERE FOR MORE ENGINEERING NEWS</s>Astronomers say this could be the largest structures in the universe

Astronomers have discovered the beginnings of what they say is a gigantic cosmic pileup that could someday form one of the largest structures in the universe.

The team of Canadian and international scientists say they used a powerful telescope to detect the “impending collision of 14 young, starbursting galaxies” that will become a massive galaxy cluster.

The research, published in the journal Nature, says the so-called protocluster or group of galaxies is 12.4 billion light years away — suggesting its light began travelling to Earth when the universe was 1.4 billion years old.

One of the researchers, astrophysicist Scott Chapman of Dalhousie University, says the discovery challenges conventional understanding of how structures form in the universe since it happened so quickly and in a space only about three times the size of the Milky Way.

Until now, astronomers had theorized that protoclusters as large as this one would have taken much longer to form.

Chapman says it gives them the opportunity to study how galaxy clusters come together in extreme environments characterized by hot, ionized gas.

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Astronomers detect light from 14 colliding galaxies. Due to the distances involved, the light comes from events which occurred around 12 billion years ago.