Largest 3D map ever made of the Universe, will help us unlock the history of Cosmos.
Hundreds of astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) collaborated to make the largest-ever, 3D map of distant galaxies.
Above, Image credit: Daniel Eisenstein and the SDSS-III collaboration
The scientists then used this map to make one of the most precise measurements yet of the dark energy currently driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
“This is one slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data.”
A section of the three-dimensional map constructed by BOSS. The rectangle on the far left shows a cutout of 1000 sq. degrees in the sky containing nearly 120,000 galaxies, or roughly 10% of the total survey. Image: Jeremy Tinker and SDSS-III
via engadget
source arXiv
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