NASA telescopes spot surprisingly mature cluster in the early universe

Astronomers at The University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new cosmic object that is much larger than anything astronomers have seen before in the distant universe. This new discovery captures the cosmic moment when a galaxy cluster—among the largest structures in the universe—started to assemble only about a billion years after the Big Bang, 1 or 2 billion years earlier than previously thought possible. This result, made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope, is described in a paper published in the journal Nature.