Researchers discover clusters of galaxies in the early universe

With observations made with the Herschel Space Observatory, with the APEX antenna and with the ALMA interferometer it has been possible to observe the formation of a cluster of galaxies in deep space, when the universe was only a tenth as old as it is now. Ivan Oteo, a former student of the University of La Laguna and of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias led the international team that made the discovery. Until now, astronomers thought that these phenomena occurred 3,000 million years after the Big Bang, but this new result shows that they were already happening when the universe was 1,500 million years old.