Chandra Release - January 28, 2026

Visual Description: JADES-ID1

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 twice, once with, and once 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. Several of those pinpoints have been circled in the annotated image, as they are part of the distant protocluster.

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.