Journey to Galaxy Proto-supercluster COSMOS-z3.1-A | Victor Blanco Telescope

Journey to Galaxy Proto-supercluster COSMOS-z3.1-A | Victor Blanco Telescope

This video zooms into 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, COSMOS-z3.1-A is the earliest, most distant proto-supercluster ever found, and it boasts an impressive mass 5,000 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 Department of Energy (DOE) fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the National Science Foundation (NSF) Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, a program of NSF NOIRLab.

The members of the proto-supercluster are difficult to see in this image due to their expansive distribution against a crowded background.

Learn about the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope:
https://noirlab.edu/science/programs/ctio/telescopes/victor-blanco-4m-telescope

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab)

Duration: 1 minute
Release Date: Sept. 8, 2026

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