Indian astronomers discover Saraswati, a supercluster of galaxies

A team of Indian astronomers led by Joydeep Bagchi of the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, has discovered one of the biggest superclusters of galaxies some 4 billion light years away from the Earth.

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The 10-billion-year-old supercluster, named Saraswati, spans over 650 million light years and contains over 10,000 galaxies distributed across 42 clusters.

The discovery was made by Bagchi and his team including Shishir Sankhyayan, a PhD student at Pune’s Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pratik Dabhade, IUCAA research fellow, Joe Jacob of Kerala’s Newman College and Prakash Sarkar of Jamshedpur’s National Institute of Technology, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Apart from Saraswati, very few comparatively large superclusters such as the Shapley Concentration or the Sloan Great Wall have been reported so far. The Milky Way galaxy is a part of the Local Group cluster, which contains over 54 other galaxies.

The results of the study were published in the Astrophysical Journal, a premier research journal of the American Astronomical Society, on Thursday.