Map of the Known Universe
Astronomers have released the largest-ever atlas of the cosmos — and it’s coming soon to the world wide web.
The Royal Astronomical Society reports:
Traditionally, astronomers have needed to take a "spectrum" of each galaxy to determine [the distance between galaxies], splitting its light into many components to reveal sharp features with which to measure the amount of redshifting. This requires a time-consuming, individual observation of each galaxy.
The new cosmic map has been constructed using a novel technique focusing on a special class of galaxy whose intrinsic colour is very well known. For these ‘Luminous Red Galaxies’ researchers can measure the amount of colour distortion, and hence the approximate distance of the galaxy, just by looking at digital images of the sky, without the need to obtain a full spectrum.
What is most striking is that the new study and atlas have revealed that "the ordinary matter our bodies are made of and that we experience in everyday life only accounts for a few percent of the total cosmic budget:"
Our Universe contains billions of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. In recent years astronomers have used increasingly large surveys to map out the positions of these galaxies, stepping their way out into the Cosmos.
The new cosmic map unveiled today is the largest to date — a three-dimensional atlas of over a million galaxies spread over a distance of more than 5 billion light years. The findings confirm that we live in a Universe filled with mysterious dark matter and dark energy."We have analyzed the patterns in this map and discovered waves of structure over a billion light years across," said Dr. Chris Blake of the University of British Columbia, principal author of the study. "These waves were generated billions of years ago and have been vastly stretched in size by the expanding Universe."
