(ORDO NEWS) — After two decades of hard work, an international team of SDSS astronomers have unveiled the most complete map of the universe ever created. CNET notes that the map covers over 12 billion years of the history of the universe.
To build the map, scientists used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and also analyzed more than four million galaxies and quasars.
The created map, according to many researchers, will help to determine the expansion rate of the Universe as accurately as possible.
Unprecedented detail
Will Percival, a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada who helped create the map, called the project “the complete story of the expansion of the universe.”
Astronomers note that about six billion years ago, the expansion rate of the universe began to skyrocket. What contributed to this? Not yet known.
The expansion rate of the Universe (the Hubble Constant) is a subject of long-standing controversy for astronomers from around the Earth: theoretical calculations surprisingly do not coincide with actual observation results, which is puzzling.
The new map should help eliminate this discrepancy and, probably, we have already come close to this understanding, having established that in a certain historical period the speed suddenly increased.
“Only with maps like this can we explain the mysterious discrepancy in the Hubble constant,” said Eva-Maria Müller, a researcher at Oxford University.
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