Astronomers find most distant galaxy proto-supercluster

An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant progenitor to a galaxy supercluster ever found, a structure observed when the universe was only 2.1 billion years old. This finding supports existing theories of galaxy cluster evolution and their connection to the cosmic web. The study, led by Purdue graduate student Vandana Ramakrishnan, identified 150 distant protoclusters using data from the ODIN survey and the Dark Energy Camera. Follow-up 3D mapping with spectrographs revealed COSMOS-z3.1-A, a proto-supercluster with mass 5,000 times that of the Milky Way, which will evolve into a structure more massive than the Coma Cluster. The detailed 3D maps show these ancient structures are clumpy and irregular, lying at intersections of cosmic web filaments, providing direct evidence of "bottom-up" structure formation. Future surveys, including the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, are expected to uncover more such massive cosmic structures.