An international team of astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) project directed by Florian Beutler from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom) and with Spanish participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the Instituto de Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, has created and l greater dimensional map of the universe, with 1.2 million galaxies contained 650.000 million cubic light years. The decade-long work has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
” This extremely detailed three-dimensional map represents a colossal amount of work by the University of Portsmouth together with partner institutions over ten years, helping to collect measurements of galaxies that make up a quarter of the sky, ” explains Beutler.
Its conclusion has been possible thanks to the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program, which offers us an overview of the permanent oscillations between the elusive dark matter and the particular dark energy.
The new map will make it possible to make the most accurate measurements of dark energy (responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe) to date and find out the role it plays in the expansion of the universe. The radius of expansion of the universe can be measured by the size of the so-called Acoustic Baryonic Oscillation (BAO) and the dimensional distribution of the galaxies.
Through the size of these oscillations that traveled through the early universe through matter and were frozen in time as a consequence of gravitational evolution, scientists have observed that galaxies are separated by a very characteristic distance, called the “acoustic scale. ”And that these move towards regions of the Universe with more matter, because of the gravitational attraction. The findings support the hypothesis that the accelerated expansion of the Universe is driven by a phenomenon like dark energy on the most colossal cosmic scales.
” If dark energy has been driving the expansion of the Universe during that time, our maps tell us that it is evolving very slowly, the change has been at most 20% in the last 7,000 million years,” concludes Beutler.
