Starting Monday, any Internet user can now view the largest and most detailed 3D map of the Universe ever created. Her birth was preceded by a 20-year study involving hundreds of scientists from three dozen research institutions from many countries.
They had done a tremendous work on the study and analysis of more than four million galaxies and quasars that have helped astrophysicists better understand the process and history of the expansion of the Universe. The main scientific instruments, the researchers began the system of multispectral shooting Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and collected over the past six years, data from an optical telescope in new Mexico.
On the map you can see the strands of matter and voids that define the structure of the Universe during its “early childhood” – about 400 thousand years after the Big Bang. And the old and red galaxies (red galaxies are in transition from a “young” age “old”) you can see a map that shows the Universe 6 billion years ago.
On the 3D map shows that at some point, the Universe expansion began to accelerate, and not stop until now. According to the researchers, the reason for this is dark energy, the invisible substance that fit into the theory of relativity, but until now not detected.
Source — SDSS