Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world — ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NAOJ’s Subaru Telescope — is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed.

This animation provides a fly-through through all the galaxies observed by the team over a patch of the sky roughly as large as four times the area of the full Moon, starting from foreground galaxies, closer to us, and then moving on further away, until the newly found galaxy filament located almost seven billion light-years away.