Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2018

34 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018 SPACE CHRONICLES Largest galaxy proto-supercluster found by ESO A team of astronomers, led by Olga Cucciati of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) Bologna, have used the VIMOS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to identify a gigantic proto-supercluster of galax- ies forming in the early Universe, just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang. This structure, which the re- searchers nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive struc- ture to be found so early in the for- mation of the Universe. The enormous mass of the proto-su- percluster is calculated to be more than one million billion times that of the Sun. This titanic mass is simi- lar to that of the largest structures observed in the Universe today, but finding such a massive object in the early Universe surprised as- tronomers. “This is the first time that such a large structure has been identified at such a high redshift, just over 2 T his visualisation shows the ex- tent of Hyperion compared to the size of a typical massive galaxy cluster in the local universe. [ESO/L. Calçada & Olga Cucciati et al.]