thesublimeblog

The Complete Universe

The Universe as we know it is a dark place, dominated by unseen dark matter and pervasive dark energy, and seeded with structures by quantum fluctuations in the infant cosmos. Those fluctuations have grown into the large-scale structure of the observable Universe, things like stars, planets and galaxies. For over 20 years, scientists on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project have been working to make a map of the Universe as it evolved through time. These high-precision maps have come into fruition and they reveal exquisite pictures of an expanding Universe over billions of years. Statistical measurements of galaxy motions and weak gravitational lensing have provided some of the strongest evidence to date that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is indeed an accurate description of gravity on cosmological scales. The latest version of the SDSS, eBOSS (Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) Version 16 has maps the Universe going back to when it was only 380,000 years old as can be seen in the time-marked line in the images below. What you are seeing is a snapshot of the Universe since the time The Big Bang.

The largest-ever 3D map of the Universe covering four million galaxies and ultra-bright, energy-packed quasars and yielding a complete story of the expansion of the Universe since the Big Bang. The map shown is a rainbow of colors of the spectrum located within the observable Universe, with the outer region showing fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. The numbers denote the look-back time in billions of years from the present. The image was produced by the latest version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) called the “Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey” (eBOSS), with data collected from an optical telescope in New Mexico over six years. Imager credit: Anand Raichoor, EPFL / Ashley Ross, Ohio State University / SDSS Collaboration.
The EBOSS map from another angle. In this image, the outer sphere is seen more clearly that shows fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background. We are located at the center of this map. The inset for each color-coded section of the map includes an image of a typical galaxy or quasar from that section, and also the signal of the pattern that the eBOSS team measures there. Imager credit: Anand Raichoor, EPFL / Ashley Ross, Ohio State University / SDSS Collaboration.


A Virtual Tour of the Universe

Here’s a video fly-through of a section of the Universe, produced by Version 9 of the SDSS in 2012. Vast as this slice of the Universe seems, it captures the Universe reaching back to only about 1.3 billion light years from Earth, covering close to 400,000 galaxies as opposed to 13.8 billion light years and some 4 million galaxies in the latest version of the SDSS (Version 16) as of July 2020.


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