SPACE SHOCK: Scientists detect BIGGEST galaxy cluster ever recorded

The astronomers have nicknamed the colossal space collection, which is the biggest structure spotted in the years just after the Big Bang, Hyperion after a titan from Greek mythology.

Hyperion is calculated to have a mass more than one million billion times that of the sun.

Olga Cucciati of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica Bologna, Italy, who led the team who made the discovery said: “This is the first time that such a large structure has been identified as such a high redshift, just over two billion years after the Big Bang.

“Normally these kinds of structures are known at lower redshifts, which means when the Universe has had much more time to evolve and construct such huge things. It was a surprise to see something this evolved when the Universe was relatively young.”

Chief of operations for the European Southern Observatory Steffen Miefke said: “Hyperion is like 5,000 galaxies of the Milky Way.”

Mr Miefke said: “These are galaxies very far from us, almost at the beginning of the universe, and allow us to understand better how the universe evolved from the Big Bang until the present day.

“Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It’s as though we were able to look at the adolescence of an 80-year-old human being.”

The Hyperion was detected using the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph, which is located in the Chilean desert 760 miles north of Santiago.

University of California astronomer, Brian Lemaux said: “Superclusters closer to Earth tend to appear as a much more concentrated distribution of mass with clear structural features.

“But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs, populated by loose associations of galaxies.”

The scientists believe that the Hyperion could evolve into something similar to a supercluster and can show astronomers how the universe developed in the past and how it will evolve into the future.