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!