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New 3D map plots out an astounding 1.2 million galaxies

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A new image that appears to be depicting a plethora of stars is actually a new 3D map of the universe that shows the locations of 1.2 million galaxies, compiled by a team of more than 100 scientists working as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) collaboration.

According to Gizmodo and The Verge, the record-setting new map shows more than 650 cubic billion light years, which is still just one-fourth of the known universe, and astronomers hope it will provide new information about the mysterious force known as dark energy which has been causing the universe to expand at an increasingly rapid rate.

The map was assembled as part of the SDSS-III’s Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, a program that measures the size of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies, the researchers explained. The original size of the BAO was established by pressure waves traveling through the universe when it was just 400,000 years old.

At this point, the oscillations became frozen in the matter distribution of the universe, resulting in galaxies that are separated by a characteristic distance referred to as the “acoustic scale”. By measuring the imprint of these BAO on galaxies, scientists are able to plot the positions and distances of galaxies throughout time, and determine how quickly said galaxies are currently moving away from one another, causing the expansion of the universe.

“We have spent a decade collecting measurements… to map out the structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light years,” co-lead investigator Jeremy Tinker, an assistant professor at New York University, explained in a statement. “This map has allowed us to make the best measurements yet of the effects of dark energy in the expansion of the Universe. We are making our results and map available to the world.”

Credit: Jeremy Tinker and SDSS-III

‘Dramatic’ link between acoustic imprints, galaxy clustering discovered

Tinker and his colleagues studied the acoustic oscillations, then plotted the relative positions of each galaxy on the map. The furthest ones are colored purple, while the closest ones are yellow. Through this research, the scientists can determine the relative speeds of each type of galaxy, as well as how quickly they’re moving away from each other.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble noticed galaxies were moving away from observers and realized the universe is expanding – groundbreaking work that led to multiple scientific revelations, including the Big Bang, according to The Verge. However, scientists were long convinced that the expansion of the universe would ultimately begin to slow down.

That all changed in 1998, when two teams of scientists published research revealing that not only was the universe continuing to expand, but it was actually accelerating. This phenomenon was attributed to a hypothetical, undetectable force named dark energy, and experts are still attempting to better understand exactly what processes are causing this to happen.

“Measuring the acoustic scale across cosmic history gives a direct ruler with which to measure the Universe’s expansion rate,” said Ariel Sanchez of the Max-Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics, a member of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) team. “With BOSS, we have traced the BAO’s subtle imprint on the distribution of galaxies spanning a range of time from 2 to 7 billion years ago.”

“If dark energy has been driving the expansion of the Universe over that time, our maps tell us that it is evolving very slowly if at all: the change is at most 20% over the past seven billion years,” noted Florian Beutler from the University of Portsmouth, who was lead author of a pair of papers based on the team’s findings that were submitted (along with several others) last week to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“We see a dramatic connection between the sound wave imprints seen in the cosmic microwave background 400,000 years after the Big Bang to the clustering of galaxies 7-12 billion years later,” added Rita Tojeiro from the University of St. Andrews, the other co-leader of the BOSS galaxy clustering working group. “The ability to observe a single well-modeled physical effect from recombination until today is a great boon for cosmology.”

—–

Image credit: Daniel Eisenstein and SDSS-III

The post New 3D map plots out an astounding 1.2 million galaxies appeared first on Redorbit.

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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113415055/universe-map-million-galaxies-071816/


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