New Delhi: Pune-based Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) team of astronomers have discovered a super-cluster of galaxies as large as 20 million billion suns and named it Saraswati.

IUCAA said that it was one of the largest structures in this neighbourhood of the universe. It is 4000 million light years away from us and is 10 million years old. It extends over a scale of 600 million light years and may contain anywhere between a 1000-10,000 different galaxies within it.

In a press statement, JoydeepBagchi from IUCAA, the lead author of the paper, said, ''We were very surprised to spot this giant wall-like supercluster of galaxies, visible in a large spectroscopic survey of distant galaxies, known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This supercluster is clearly embedded in a large network of cosmic filaments traced by clusters and large voids. Our work will help to shed light on the perplexing question; how such extreme large scale, prominent matter-density enhancements had formed billions of years in the past when the mysterious Dark Energy had just started to dominate structure formation.”

Ends