Saraswati, IUCAA, space, discovery,
The distribution of galaxies, from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), in Saraswati supercluster. It is clearly visible that the density of galaxies is very high in the Saraswati supercluster region. The typical size of a galaxy here is around 250,000 light years. The galaxy sizes are increased for representationIUCAA

An extremely large supercluster of galaxies – Saraswati -- is discovered by a team of researchers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Pune, India, and members of two other Indian universities.

Also Read: Is Earth heading towards the sixth mass extinction?

Here are top 5 facts to know about this huge supercluster of galaxies:

  1. The lead author Joydeep Bagchi and co-author Shishir Sankhyayan revealed that they were surprised to discover this supercluster visible in a large spectroscopic survey of distant galaxies, which is known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
  2. This supercluster is present at a distance of 4,000 million light years away from Earth in the direction of constellation Pisces.
  3. This huge Saraswati supercluster spreads over a scale of 600 million light years and is guesstimated to possess the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion Suns, the researchers revealed.
  4. The Saraswati supercluster is found to be way more distant in comparison to the other enormous superclusters spotted so far, like the Shapley Concentration or the Sloan Great Wall which was first discovered in 1932, Somak Raychaudhury, currently Director of IUCAA, Pune elucidated.
  5. According to the statement by the IUCAA: "Superclusters are the largest coherent structures in the cosmic web. They are a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters, bound by gravity, often stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies."
Also Read