'Sarswati,' a supercluster of galaxies discovered by Indian scientists

Its mass extends over the scale of 600 million light years, it said.

In a pathbreaking achievement, Indian scientists have discovered a huge supercluster of galaxies ( as big as 20 million billion suns) which has been named Saraswati.

This was informed by a Pune-based Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).

This is one of the largest known structures in the neighbourhood of the universe, 4,000 million light-years away from Earth and roughly more than 10 billion years old, IUCAA said.

Its mass extends over the scale of 600 million light years, it said. Scientists of this institute were also involved in the path-breaking discovery of gravitational waves last year.

The supercluster was discovered by Shishir Sankhyayan, a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, Pratik Dabhade, IUCAA research fellow, Joe Jacob of the Newman College, Kerala, and Prakash Sarkar of the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Their findings were published in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the premier research journal of the American Astronomical Society. "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," the IUCAA said in a statement. Sankhyayan said this "newly-discovered Saraswati supercluster" extends over a scale of 600 million light-years and may contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.

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