The team that made the discovery was led by Olga Cucciati of Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) Bologna, Italy, and project scientist Brian Lemaux in the Department of Physics, College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, and included Lori Lubin, professor of physics at UC Davis. They used the VIMOS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile, to identify a gigantic proto-supercluster of galaxies forming in the early universe, just 2.3 billion years after the Big Bang.