A team of American astronomers, led by astronomers Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel, has just unveiled the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created.
Spanning across 10 cosmic slices shaped like a V from the northern sky, this new map encompasses a vast area of space containing over 1 million galaxies, including 600,000 galaxies emitting red light, and stretches up to 5.6 billion light-years away, which accounts for 40% of the time when tracing back to the Big Bang event.
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The new three-dimensional map of the universe in chart form – Image: Hogg/SDSS-II |
“What’s new about this map is that it is the largest ever created,” said astronomer Nikhil Padmanabhan from Princeton University.
David Schlegel from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory added that because it is the largest map to date, “it allows us to measure the structure of cosmic objects across a distance of about 1 billion light-years from one side to the other.”
This new map reveals a universe filled with dark energy, which is driving galaxies further apart at an increasingly rapid pace, causing the universe to expand at a faster rate. This dark energy accounts for up to 75% of the universe’s energy and remains one of the greatest mysteries that science has yet to explain.
To complete this new map of the universe, American astronomers had to determine the distances between galaxies using spectroscopic techniques.
TUONG VY
