SCIENCE
3 June 2026 SCIENCE
An international team of researchers led by Dr. Ronaldo Laishram from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has discovered an ancient cosmic structure named the “Loktak Protocluster”.
Located 12.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Sextans, the structure allows astronomers to observe the universe as it existed when it was only 1.2 billion years old (9% of its current age).
It is named after Loktak Lake in Manipur, the largest freshwater lake in Northeast India, famous for its “phumdis” (floating masses of vegetation). The discovery was made by integrating data from the Japan-based Subaru Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of NASA.
