Astronomers Discover Massive Protosupercluster 5,000 Times Heavier Than Milky Way

An international research team, including Korean astronomers, has discovered a protosupercluster with a mass 5,000 times that of the Milky Way, making it the most distant and massive such structure found to date. Located approximately 12 billion light-years away, the structure, named COSMOS-z3.1-A, was identified using the ODIN survey instrument in Chile. Researchers reconstructed its 3D structure using spectroscopic data from multiple telescopes, revealing an irregular shape at the intersection of cosmic web filaments. The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, demonstrate that massive cosmic structures were already forming when the universe was just 2 billion years old, providing crucial observational evidence for early universe evolution theories.