[Some hope remaining.]

The cluster, located at a distance of roughly 1 billion light-years, contains a tunnel in the hot gas, ... The tunnel, which appears to originate near the core of the central giant galaxy in the cluster, may be more than 200 million years old, researchers said.

If something is a billion light years away but approximately 200 million years old can we see it? Or maybe they were saying the light which has reached us and which we now see may have been emitted when the tunnel was 200 million years old? Just wondering.

[JasonC]

The latter. The light took something under a billion years to get here, while the universe expanded some in the meantime. But the structure they see from that old light, is already hundreds of thousands of light years across. It is at least hundreds of thousands of years old, and if the stuff involved is mostly moving at the sort of speeds stars typically having circling their galaxy, then millions is much more likely. They are estimating the age by comparing the size with what they estimate for the speed of the cloud. (Speed shifts the color of the light slightly, but detectably).