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Astronomers create first large-scale map of universe
A collaboration of astronomers who are part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has led to the creation of the first large-scale structure map of the universe.
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Based on the positions of quasars -- bright points of light that are powered by black holes -- the map will likely be utilized to improve understanding of dark energy. (Shutterstock/File)
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collaboration of astronomers who are part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has led to the creation of the first large-scale structure map of the universe.
Based on the positions of quasars —bright points of light powered by black holes— the map will likely be utilized to improve understandings of dark energy.
"These quasars are so far away that their light left them when the universe was between three and seven billion years old, long before the Earth even existed," said Gongbo Zhao, one of the study's co-leaders from the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Science, to Xinhua.
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In creating the map, the astronomers used the Sloan Foundation Telescope to observe light from an unprecedented amount of quasars, managing to get accurate three-dimension positions for over 147,000.
Professor and deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) under Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xue Suijian, told Xinhua that, "to unveil the mystery of cosmic acceleration, the astronomers have been trying to map the Universe from now to the remote past. The Chinese astronomers, especially those from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) working on observational and theoretical cosmology, have been playing key roles in the large international collaborations of the eBOSS galaxy survey.” (sul/kes)
