An international group of astronomers has announced the discovery of a massive structure consisting of 20 massive galaxies called the Cosmic Line. It has a size of about 13 million world years. Results of the study published on the arXiv preprint server.
The giant structure was discovered at a redshift of 3.44 (corresponding to a distance of 22 billion light-years) in the Extended Grotto Belt (EGS) region during observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
The cosmic line is approximately 13.04 light-years long and 0.65 million light-years wide. Therefore, this structure is significantly larger than other compact galaxy groups and protoclusters at redshifts higher than 3.0. The total mass of the galaxies involved reaches 260 billion solar masses.
The two most massive galaxies of this structure, designated Galaxy A and Galaxy E, are quiescent (with star formation rates below 0.5 solar masses per year). The massive and dense structures of galaxies are considered to be the initial stage in the evolution of galaxy clusters, the most massive gravitationally bound systems in the Universe. Discovering new structures of this type and studying them is important for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. /BGNES
