Scientists create the biggest 3D map of the universe ever – and find intriguing discoveries inside

(KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld)

Scientist shave created the most detailed three dimensional map of the universe ever.

The researchers hope that the map could eventually help tell us where the cosmos came from and where it is going, by giving us a better understanding of dark energy.

And they have already spotted intriguing details in the data: it is helping to reveal the secret of the most powerful lights in the universe.

“There is a lot of beauty to it,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Julien Guy.

“In the distribution of the galaxies in the 3D map, there are huge clusters, filaments, and voids. They’re the biggest structures in the universe. But within them, you find an imprint of the very early universe, and the history of its expansion since then.”

The map was made possible by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. That has been working for seven months, and is only 10 per cent of the way through its mission – but it has already produced more detailed 3D data that any survey of the galaxy before.

DESI works by collecting detailed images of millions of galaxies, looking out over more than a third of the sky. Those images break down the different colours of light, allowing scientists to trace how far away it has come before it has reached Earth – that, in turn, tells them how “deep” that part of the sky is, and how far away they are looking.

That gives researchers a three dimensional picture as they look out into the sky. That can be used to find clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and by examining those scientists can try and understand how the universe has expanded from its very beginnings.

Knowing that could also help us understand how it will end. As the universe expands, it creates dark energy – which already accounts for 70 per cent of the cosmos – and when that happens, the expansion speed increases.

As it speeds up, so does the creation of dark energy. That creates a cycle that means the expansion gets ever faster and so does the proportion of dark energy within the cosmos.

Knowing how that is happening and where it is headed could allow us to work out the eventual end of the universe. Scientists don’t yet know what will happen – whether it will keep expanding without stopping, eventually turn around and collapse in a reverse Big Bang, or rip itself into oblivion.

So far, DESI’s work is incomplete and the answers to those big questions remain unknown. But the data that scientists have collected so far is allowing them to look backwards in unprecedented ways, peering back more than 10 billions years to the beginnings of galaxies.

That has included discovering more about quasars, which are particularly bright galaxies that are among the brightest and most distant objects that we know about. Scientists are already using the information from the DESI to understand more about how they come to exist – as well as using them to plot out other parts of the cosmos.

“I like to think of them as lampposts, looking back in time into the history of the universe,” said Victoria Fawcett, an astronomy graduate student at Durham University, in a statement.