protosuper copia

Captured within this image is the newly discovered galaxy proto-supercluster named COSMOS-z3.1-A. A proto-supercluster is a loose collection of galaxies that will one day coalesce into a stable ‘cluster-of-clusters’ of galaxies. Having been observed when the Universe was only 2.1 billion years old, this is the earliest, most distant proto-supercluster ever found, and it boasts an impressive mass 5000 times that of the Milky Way Galaxy. COSMOS-z3.1-A was discovered using data from the One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) survey. This survey is conducted with the DOE-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, a program of NSF NOIRLab. See an unannotated version of this image here. See an animated 3D model of COSMOS-z3.1-A here.