This one may not be about renewable energy but, we have to share it and it will blow your mind! Inhabitat announced.
A new map reveals the universe is more massive than we think. Astronomers with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and a Sloan Digital Sky Survey III program measured the galaxies in a volume of 650 cubic billion light years and created a map with a head smashing 1.2 million galaxies! Not only does the map give us a new perspective on how vast the universe is, it also helped astronomers measure dark energy.
The 3D map is the largest ever of its kind and brings together a decade of hard work. Jeremy Tinkers, physics professor at New York University and one of the team leaders said in their press release that they have spent 10 years collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one-quarter of the sky map out the structure if the universe. The map has allowed them to make the best measurements yet of the effects of dark energy in the Universe’s expansion.
The map that they have shown may appear as a collection of stars but each of those dots actually represents one galaxy from six billion years ago. The image showed 3% of the entire dataset that was gathered by the SDSS-III. The yellow dots are the galaxies closest to Earth and the purple dots are the galaxies furthest away. The grey patches do not have any data available for now.
Many scientists asked how these maps provide insight into dark energy. The team explains that the BOSS measures sound waves from the young Universe when it was just 400,000 years old. These sound waves helped astronomers make their map.
The astronomers have submitted their research to the monthly journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”.
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Image credit: Inhabitat