Calcada & Olga Cucciati et al/Handout

(Reuters) - Astronomers peering billions of light years into space have detected the largest, most extensive collection of galaxies ever registered in the early days of the universe, a “proto-supercluster” they nicknamed Hyperion after a titan from Greek mythology. The galaxy proto-supercluster, nicknamed Hyperion, was identified using the VIMOS instrument on European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile, said researchers from the University of California, Davis in the US. Hyperion, as scientists are calling it, is a proto-supercluster that holds an enormous quantity of mass, more than 1 million billion times the mass of the sun, the discovering astronomical team reports. “It was a surprise to see something this evolved when the universe was relatively young,” said Olga Cucciati, astronomer and first author of the study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The team found that Hyperion has a very complex structure, containing at least seven high-density regions connected by filaments of galaxies, and its size is comparable to superclusters closer to Earth, though it has a very different structure. "Superclusters closer to Earth tend to a much more concentrated distribution of mass with clear structural features,” said University of California at Davis astronomer Brian Lemaux, co-leader of the research team. “But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs, populated by loose associations of galaxies.”

The research, entitled “The progeny of a Cosmic Titan” will feature in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Astronomers discover Hyperion, an ancient proto-supercluster that appeared 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.