James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:
A new discovery made using both NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope shows that galaxy clusters, among the largest structures in the universe, may have started forming earlier in the universe than previously thought. JADES-ID1 has a mass of about 20 trillion times that of the Sun, and is actually a “protocluster.” One day it will be a full-fledged galaxy cluster, but it’s currently undergoing an early, violent phase of formation. Its formation comes about one to two billion years sooner than astronomers expected for a galaxy cluster, giving astronomers a new mystery about how it could form so quickly. It also may be the most distant confirmed protocluster yet seen.
Galaxy clusters contain hundreds (sometimes thousands) of individual galaxies immersed in enormous pools of superheated gas, along with large amounts of unseen dark matter. In this image, Webb data shows at least 66 galaxies that are potential members of this protocluster. As the galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shockwaves up to millions of degrees, causing it to glow in X-rays. Chandra data showing the huge gas cloud is shown in blue.
Read more: chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/protoc/index.html
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/Á Bogdán; Infrared (JWST): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds and L. Frattare
Visual description:
This composite image features what may be the most distant protocluster ever found; a region of space where a large number of young galaxies are being held together by gravity and hot gas. The image is presented here without annotations.
The image includes scores of glowing dots and specks of light, in white and golden hues, set against the blackness of space. This layer of the composite visual is from a deep infrared imaging project undertaken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The specks range from relatively large oval galaxies with discernible spiral arms, and glowing balls with gleaming diffraction spikes, to minuscule pinpoints of distant light.
Layered onto the center of this image is a neon blue cloud. This cloud represents hot X-ray gas discovered by Chandra in the deepest X-ray observation ever conducted. In the annotated image, a thin white square surrounds the blue cloud. This represents Chandra’s field of observation. The X-rays from the distant protocluster located within this box are included in the composite image.
The protocluster, dubbed JADES-1, has a mass of about 20 trillion suns. It is located some 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, or just a billion years after the big bang. The discovery of a protocluster of this size, at this epoch in the early universe, will lead scientists to re-examine their ideas for how galaxy clusters first appeared in the universe.

