Scientists just mapped a huge part of our
universe and found out…
Einstein is always right.
Hi there cosmic entities!
Ian here for DNews…. and prepare to have
your mind BLOWN.
Researchers have created an incredible 3-dimensional
map of a region of the universe.
As part of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic
Survey, or BOSS, which is headed by the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey, they pinpointed a whopping
1.2 million galaxies covering a quarter of
the visible sky!
It’s a volume that is about 650 cubic billion
light years big.
Within that huge expanse, astronomers start
to see the large-scale structure of the cosmos
between two to seven billion light-years away.
In other words, they’re spying on the universe
as it was two to seven billion years AGO.
And it just so happens that this is an important
era to study if we are to understand the strange
effects of dark energy.
Now, dark energy makes up for 70% of ALL the
energy in the universe and has a bizarre anti-gravity
effect on space-time, causing it to expand.
And the expansion is accelerating.
So cosmologists REALLY want to know what dark
energy IS and how it’s going to shape the
evolution of the universe.
In an effort to get to grips with this mysterious
energy, astronomers need to think really big,
capturing the motion of a HUGE number of galaxies.
This is where BOSS comes in.
Now...things get a little more complicated.
So bear with me.
At the moment of the Big Bang, 13.82 billion
years ago, there was just energy.
As time went on, the universe expanded and
cooled and matter started to condense to form
the quarks, atoms, electrons and all that
other good stuff our universe contains.
During this early time, baryon acoustic oscillations,
or BAOs, rippled through the early universe.
You can imagine these BAOs as a bit like sound
waves traveling through a gas.
They created regions of dense matter and regions
empty of matter.
The BAOs started out small, but as the universe
expanded, they expanded with it and became
larger, leaving their fingerprint in the structure
of the universe.
As this happened, clusters of galaxies formed
inside the high density regions caused by
the BAOs.
The most incredible thing is that BOSS can
SEE the BAOs in the galaxies recorded in this
massive 3D map.
But what does this mean?
Well, in this new research published in the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society, astronomers have specifically looked
back into the time when it is theorized that
dark energy really took hold of universal
expansion, causing vast galactic clusters
to fly away from one another.
By studying those 1.2 million galaxies that
existed between 2 to 7 billion years ago,
and recording the distance between the dense
clusters, we can see how fast the universe
expanded under the force of dark energy.
And it appears the universe is expanding in
PRECISELY the way we THEORIZED, with dark
energy continually stretching spacetime while
the gravity of dark matter is trying to pull
it all back in again.
This gives us further evidence for the existence
of dark matter AND dark energy.
But do you want to know the best thing?
By studying the motions of so many galaxies
over such a huge volume, this research has
shown that general relativity holds true over
cosmological scales.
Yes, Einstein’s theory has been proven correct
again.
Shocker.
Want to know more about some of BOSS’s awesome
finds?
Watch my recent DNews video to find out more
about how its discoveries are challenging
our views of the cosmos
Does dark energy freak you out, just a little?
Let us know in the comments down below and
don’t forget to subscribe to DNews!
