Largest Map of Universe Created

A pair of new atlases of the universe span 5.6 billion light-years out into space, about 40 percent of the way to the edge of the visible universe, encompassing over one million galaxies within that region. The maps were created by two teams, one led by Chris Black of the University of British Columbia and another led by Nikhil Padmanabhan of Princeton University.

The teams both used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico, as well as other telescopes. To understand the distances involved for 3-dimensional orientations, they created an algorithm to perform the analysis of 10,000 luminous red galaxies - very old, bright galaxies whose true colors are well known. The spectrum distortions in these galaxies were easier to find, and they used that information to expand the map to the rest of the observed region.

Both teams detected mathematical patterns hinting at larger structures within the universe, the first evidence for such patterns outside of the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang. The initial findings confirm that only a few percent of the universe is composed of visible matter, with about a quarter of it consisting of dark matter and the rest of dark energy.

For more information on the subject, you can check out the abstract of the upcoming paper (by the Padmanabhan team) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. There are also articles on the topic through New Scientist, Space.com, and Scientific American.