Qiong Li

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was nearly uniform, like smooth dough. But within a billion years, in some places the dough began to rise faster: clumps of hundreds of galaxies emerged, which astronomers call protoclusters. These are the seeds of future giant clusters, the most massive bound structures in the universe.

Within a field of view the size of a grain of sand held up to the eye, hundreds of galaxies lie hidden, smeared into arcs by the massive cluster Abell S1063.