FROM LOKTAK TO THE COSMOS: RESEARCHER NAMES GIANT GALAXY STRUCTURE AFTER ICONIC LAKE

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]A 29-year-old astrophysicist from Manipur has brought global recognition to the northeast after leading the discovery of a massive early universe galaxy structure named the Lock Dock Proto Cluster. Ronaldo Laishram, a post-doctoral researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, led an international research team that identified the giant proto cluster located around 12.6 billion light-years away.

[00:00:27]Dating back to a period when the universe was about 1.2 billion years old, the findings were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[00:00:37]The discovery was made using the Subaru telescope and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists say that the research offers fresh insight into how galaxies formed and evolved in dense cosmic environments during the early stages of the universe. Ronaldo explained that galaxies growing in crowded regions behave differently from isolated galaxies, much like the contrast between life and cities and villages. The study found that galaxies inside the dense proto cluster appeared physically larger than galaxies in evolving alone in space.

[00:01:10]The newly discovered structure was named after Loktak Lake, Manipur's iconic freshwater lake known for its floating phumdis.

[00:01:18]Ronaldo said the interconnected structure of the galaxy system reminded him of the floating island of Loktak, making the name a symbolic connection between Manipur and the wider universe.

[00:01:32]galaxies and there are more than 50 or 60 galaxies. So, this are structure connected into the four beams.

[00:01:40]And the so it is at around 12.6 billion years from here now.

[00:01:45]So, when we discover it in the terms of the from the Big Bang, so that's I will complete that about that so that they mean people can understand. So, the Big Bang is started at 13.8 billion years ago.

[00:01:57]And so and this local photo cluster is after 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. So this is So this is very new. We call it high redshift. So they are very young galaxies.

[00:02:09]And uh from the previous work is we cannot easily identify this kind of structure where over density together over density together. And So this is why this uh kind of research is very important so that we will understand what is happening out there and what are the properties of galaxies in this overdensity. And Yeah. So we discovered this using the Subaru telescope. Subaru telescope is in Hawaii. The we may say and also with the James Webb Space Telescope which is in space. So James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most powerful telescope for many ever been in the mid-infrared. And so that with the help of this telescope we can take the images and the see the analyze the base in the understand what is happening in the small scale.

[00:02:59]And the significance of this result is that So in the local universe, when I say local universe, it is around our surrounding where we have all Milky Way galaxies. We are now in the Milky Way galaxies. This is we call local universe. In this we understand that if the galaxies are located in over density environment, like let's say city, and also those people Those people who is staying in the city and the countryside, it is actually different in the lifestyle, food, and everything.

[00:03:29]Similarly, galaxy also which stay in the over density environment like interactions, their properties is different from the one which stay isolated.

[00:03:39]And it's well-known study at the local universe in our surrounding that those galaxies located in the overdensity uh environment of we call it cluster are already different properties like they form the star earlier, they die earlier.

[00:03:54]But we don't know what is happening in the earlier universe. When we say earlier universe, when the universe was very young.

[00:04:01]And so my work and strength to understand how those galaxies are formed and how they are evolving like how they evolve from that time to current time. And so with the help of this telescope, we discovered this in the photo first time in the search in this kind of a survey that we found that the environment which we didn't know earlier that it also affected the high density in the high earlier universe. We found that even this kind of over density environment, they shape the uh galaxies they influence the galaxies shape which is only possible with the help of this instrument space telescope.

[00:04:41]So this is the uniqueness. So my uh our discovery like result is that we with the help of this we understand for the first time that environment when I say environment the like the over density interaction galaxies, they influence the shape of the galaxies where we found that those galaxies located in the kind of system like over dense are uh like they their size is bigger than the one which is say isolated which are state