NASA telescopes have spotted a galaxy cluster 8.5 billion light-years away, the space agency announced Tuesday. It is the most massive structure ever found such a long distance from Earth.
The space agency explains a galaxy cluster is a group of thousands of galaxies, each of which contain hundreds of billions of stars, and grow bigger over time. Because light takes time to reach earth, scientists can see these objects as if they were in the past. NASA is now watching this galaxy cluster called Massive Overdense Object (MOO) J1142+1527 as it was 8.5 billion years ago, long before the Earth formed.
“Based on our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow from the very beginning of our universe, this cluster should be one of the five most massive in existence at that time,” Peter Eisenhardt, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a post on NASA’s website.
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Write to Eliana Dockterman at eliana.dockterman@time.com