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A team of astronomers has located the largest cluster of galaxies at the longest distance ever.

The discovery was made possible NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, NASA said. The galaxy cluster is 8.5 billion light years away, contains thousands of galaxies, and continues to grow.

The cluster has been named Massive Overdense Object J1142+1527 and was located because of the Spitzer and WISE telescopes. WISE took massive images of as much of the sky as possible to give researchers a starting point. After looking intensely at WISE images, the researchers pointed Spitzer toward the areas where they thought that they would have the most success and learn the most.

"It's the combination of Spitzer and WISE that lets us go from a quarter billion objects down to the most massive galaxy clusters in the sky," said Anthony Gonzalez of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The scientists believe that this cluster is one of the few left of its age and size.

"Based on our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow from the very beginning of our universe, this cluster should be one of the five most massive in existence at that time," said co-author Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The findings are encouraging, and the scientists have a list of 1,700 other clusters that they plan to evaluate.

Given the scale of everything involved, these scientists shouldn't be looking for a job anytime soon.