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Swarajya Staff
Jul 14, 2017, 10:11 AM | Updated 10:11 AM IST
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A team of Indian scientists has discovered a previously unknown supercluster of galaxies, some four billion light years away from Earth, and named it Saraswati.
A supercluster is a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters which are bound by gravity. According to reports, this supercluster is supposed to have originated around 10 billion years ago and contains over 10,000 galaxies in 42 clusters.
A team of astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune were involved in the identification of this supercluster of galaxies which may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.
This is one of the largest known structures in the neighbourhood of the universe, said IUCAA, which was also involved in the discovery of gravitational waves.
This discovery will be published in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the premier research journal of the American Astronomical Society.