Overview
- An international team led by Ronaldo Laishram, a postdoctoral researcher at Japan’s NAOJ, reported the discovery of a massive protocluster called the Loktak Protocluster using wide-field and space telescopes.
- The system lies about 12.6 billion light-years away in the direction of Sextans and dates to a time when the universe was roughly 1.2 billion years old.
- Researchers first flagged the overdense region in Subaru Telescope Lyman-α surveys and then used JWST imaging and spectroscopy to map and confirm the protocluster’s structure.
- The JWST and Subaru data show galaxies inside the overdense region are physically larger than similar galaxies in less crowded regions, indicating environment influenced galaxy size and growth early on.
- Laishram named the structure after Manipur’s Loktak Lake to link his home to the finding, a move that drew local recognition and highlights the team’s larger, ongoing program to map early cosmic overdensities.