A team of international scientists led by Australian researchers have found the most distant example of a galaxy cluster yet discovered, in one of the most well observed sectors of sky, but a whopping 10.5 billion light years away.
The study, called the FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey, was led by Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist Dr Lee Spitler.
"Our galaxy cluster is observed when the Universe was only three billion years old," said Dr Spitler in a press release.
"This means it is still young and should continue to grow into an extremely dense structure containing many more galaxies."
The discovery of such a young cluster, already made up of 30 galaxies, could prove useful for the study of galaxy formation.
Part of the reason the cluster went undiscovered for so long in what is an otherwise well-documented area of sky was simply because, in observational astronomy, it can be quite difficult to actually work out what you're looking at, and especially how far away it is.
As it turns out, another survey, also involving Aussie scientists, is working at this problem, using the new infra-red-equipped FourStar Camera mounted on the Chilean Magellan telescope to get a better idea of distance, so that more discoveries like this one can be made.
The study is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
