Astrophysicists have created what they describe as the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created.
The map was released by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has been surveying the sky since 2000.
“We know the ancient history of the Universe quite well and its recent history of expansion, but there is a problematic gap in the middle of 11 billion years,” said University of Utah cosmologist Kyle Dawson, who led the research team involved. on the 3D map, in a sentence. “For five years, we have worked to fill that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most important advancements in cosmology in the past decade.”
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More than 2 billion galaxies and quasars were measured for the project, which spans 11 billion years of cosmic time. Quasars are highly active supermassive black holes.
The SDSS map is shown as a rainbow of colors, located within the observable Universe (the outer sphere, which shows fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background). We are located in the center of this map, according to SDSS. “The box for each color-coded section of the map includes an image of a galaxy or quasar typical of that section, and also the pattern signal that the eBOSS team measures there,” he explains. “Looking into the distance, we look back in time. So the location of these signals reveals the rate of expansion of the Universe at different times in cosmic history.”
(Image credit: Anand Raichoor (EPFL), Ashley Ross (Ohio State University) and the SDSS Collaboration)
The research took advantage of data from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBoss), which is one of the components of SDSS.
“Taken together, detailed analyzes of the eBOSS map and previous SDSS experiments have now provided the most accurate measurements of the expansion history over the widest range of cosmic time,” said Will Percival of the University of Waterloo Canada, Scientist at EBOSS survey, in the statement. “These studies allow us to connect all of these measurements into a complete history of the expansion of the Universe.”
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The map reveals the “strands and gaps” in the structure of the universe, starting from a point when the universe was only about 300,000 years old. “The cosmic history that has been revealed on this map shows that about 6 billion years ago, the expansion of the Universe began to accelerate, and since then it has become increasingly faster,” says SDSS in the statement. “This accelerated expansion appears to be due to a mysterious invisible component of the Universe called ‘dark energy’, consistent with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but extremely difficult to reconcile with our current understanding of particle physics.”
In 2012, an international team of researchers published the results of a two-year study that said the probability that dark energy is real is 99,996 percent, according to Space.com.
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In a separate project, the researchers recently found evidence of a star emerging from its orbit with another star in a “partial supernova,” now rushing through the Milky Way.
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