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Letters to Nature
Nature 427, 47-50 (1 January 2004) | doi:10.1038/nature02125; Received 15 July 2003; Accepted 9 October 2003
A large population of 'Lyman-break' galaxies in a protocluster at redshift z 
4.1
George K. Miley1, Roderik A. Overzier1, Zlatan I. Tsvetanov2, Rychard J. Bouwens3, Narciso Benítez2, John P. Blakeslee2, Holland C. Ford2, Garth D. Illingworth3, Marc Postman4, Piero Rosati5, Mark Clampin4, George F. Hartig4, Andrew W. Zirm1, Huub J. A. Röttgering1, Bram P. Venemans1, David R. Ardila2, Frank Bartko6, Tom J. Broadhurst7, Robert A. Brown2, Chris J. Burrows2, E. S. Cheng8, Nicholas J. G. Cross2, Carlos De Breuck5, Paul D. Feldman2, Marijn Franx1, David A. Golimowski2, Caryl Gronwall2, Leopoldo Infante9, André R. Martel2, Felipe Menanteau2, Gerhardt R. Meurer2, Marco Sirianni2, Randy A. Kimble8, John E. Krist6, William B. Sparks4, Hien D. Tran2, Richard L. White4 & Wei Zheng2
- Leiden Observatory, University of Leiden, PO Box 9513, Leiden, 2300 RA, The Netherlands
- Department of Physics & Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
- Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
- Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
- European Southern Observatory, Garching, D-85748, Germany
- Bartko Science & Technology, Mead, Colorado 80542-0670, USA
- The Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel
- NASA-Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA
- Departmento de Astronomía y Astrofísica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 22, Chile
Correspondence to: George K. Miley1 Email: miley@strw.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract
The most massive galaxies and the richest clusters are believed to have emerged from regions with the largest enhancements of mass density1, 2, 3, 4 relative to the surrounding space. Distant radio galaxies may pinpoint the locations of the ancestors of rich clusters, because they are massive systems associated with 'overdensities' of galaxies that are bright in the Lyman-
line of hydrogen5, 6, 7. A powerful technique for detecting high-redshift galaxies is to search for the characteristic 'Lyman break' feature in the galaxy colour, at wavelengths just shortwards of Ly, which is due to absorption of radiation from the galaxy by the intervening intergalactic medium. Here we report multicolour imaging of the most distant candidate7, 8, 9 protocluster, TN J1338–1942 at a redshift z 
4.1. We find a large number of objects with the characteristic colours of galaxies at that redshift, and we show that this excess is concentrated around the targeted dominant radio galaxy. Our data therefore indicate that TN J1338–1942 is indeed the most distant cluster progenitor of a rich local cluster, and that galaxy clusters began forming when the Universe was only ten per cent of its present age.
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