Luckily for us all or not, the Universe is outrageously big, which means countless chances to find intelligent life one day or extend our influence beyond our planet. Earth will finish its resources one day, and finding another home for us among the trillions of exoplanets out there will be mandatory.
But just how big is the Universe? Its observable part is over 96 billion light-years in diameter, and we have all the reasons to believe that the entire Universe is much bigger. The problem is that light coming from the deepest depths of the Cosmos didn’t have enough time to reach us during the 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
Over four million galaxies and quasars analyzed
Hundreds of scientists from around 30 institutions across the world had been analyzing millions of large cosmic objects such as galaxies and quasars for creating the largest 3D map of the Universe. Will Percival from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, said that the scientists managed to assemble a “complete story of the expansion of the universe”.
The map showcases the latest observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), dubbed as the “extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey” (eBOSS). The data was collected over six years from an optical telescope in New Mexico.
Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah was the scientist who revealed the map, and he said that researchers tackled a “troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years”.
The map is reliable enough
The map seems convincing enough, as researchers drew on “celestial objects that indicate the distribution of matter in the distant Universe, galaxies that actively form stars and quasars”. Furthermore, the map shows matter and voids that define the structure of the Universe since its early stages.
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, judging by how much time it ran after the Big Bang. Further researchers about the beginning of the Universe are needed, as plenty of scientists suspect that there are many other universes out there in the infinite ocean of reality.
