Robert Rathbun Wilson, a Wyoming cowboy who built the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator laboratory with the eye of an artist, the shrewdness of a banker and the conscience of a human rights activist, died late Sunday night at a retirement home in Ithaca, New York, near Cornell University. He was 85.

Astronomers have announced the discovery of a wall of distant galaxies crossing the Hubble Deep Field at a distance of some 4 billion light years from Earth.