more articles like this Hubble Finds Farthest Protocluster of
Galaxies updated: Jan 10, 2012, 9:06 AM NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope has uncovered a cluster of galaxies in the initial
stages of construction - the most distant such grouping ever
observed in the early universe. An astrophysicist at UC Santa
Barbara contributed to the discovery. In a random sky survey
made in near-infrared light, Hubble spied five tiny galaxies
clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. Among the
brightest galaxies at that epoch, they are very young, living
just 600 million years after the universe's birth in the Big
Bang. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the
universe, comprising hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound
together by gravity. The developing cluster, or protocluster,
presumably will grow into one of today's massive galactic
cities, comparable to the nearby Virgo cluster, a collection of
more than 2,000 galaxies. "Just a couple of years ago, a
discovery like this one would have seemed impossible,"