An interim map of the universe produced by a modified telescope in Arizona is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever, but the instrument is only a tenth of the way through its five-year mission.
The Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Sonoran Desert, about 50 miles west of Tucson, was the location of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a collaboration between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and scientists around the world.
The purpose of the project is to create a larger 3D map of the universe to better understand the physics of dark energy, the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.
Did a dark energy discovery prove Einstein wrong? Not quite.
"There is a lot of beauty to it," said a physicist at Berkeley Lab who is working on the project. There are huge clusters in the 3D map of the galaxies.
He said that they are the biggest structures of the universe. You can find an imprint of the very early universe within them. Understanding the effects of dark energy could help determine the fate of the universe.
The instrument for the three-dimensional survey was prepared by the DESI team using a giant two-dimensional map of the universe that was released in January.
The new 3D map shows the locations of over 7.5 million galaxies, which is more than the previous record of 930,000.
In this 3D scanned of the universe, Earth is shown in the lower left, looking at the directions of the constellation Serpens and Hercules to a distance beyond 5 billion light-years. The colored points represent the 100 billion to 1 trillion stars of a galaxy. The "cosmic web" is made up of dense clusters, filaments and voids. Data from the DESI is used by the Berkeley Lab.
The survey was done by the galaxy.
According to a statement from Berkeley Lab, DESI collects images of millions of galaxies spread out across a third of the sky.
Scientists can determine how much light has been shifted by the expansion of the universe by examining the color spectrum of the light from each galaxy. The faster a galaxy is moving away, the closer it is to Earth.
Our universe is now 92 billion light-years across, and it has been expanding since it began about 13 billion years ago.
Snapshots of our universe through time are related.
The scientists with the DESI project hope their 3D map of the universe will reveal the "depth" of the sky and help them chart clusters and superclusters of galaxies. The researchers hope to use the data to determine the expansion history of the universe, because those structures carry echoes of their initial formation.
Guy said that the science goal was to measure the waves in the primordial plasma. It's amazing that we can detect the effects of these waves billions of years later.
There is dark energy.
Scientists used to think that the universe was expanding at a constant rate, or that the combined matter and energy in the universe might eventually cause that expansion to slow down. The phrase "dark energy" was used by scientists to explain the sudden expansion of stellar explosions.
Dark energy makes up 70% of the total energy in the observable universe. The effects of dark energy have been included in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and have become a crucial scientific goal in recent decades.
It seems that the expansion of the universe causes more dark energy to be created.
The fate of the universe will be determined by the effects of dark energy, whether it expands forever, collapses in a type of reverse Big Bang or is torn apart.
The redshifts of 2.5 million galaxies are being cataloged by DESI. The team expects to complete the 3D survey map by the year 2026, which will allow the telescope to observe an estimated 35 million galaxies.
Some early astrophysical results from the instrument will be presented this week at a Berkeley Lab seminar.
Live Science published the original article.
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