Using images from the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a team of astronomers has created the largest map of the universe that comprises more than a billion galaxies. The result is fascinating and has occupied an incredible amount of approximately one million gigabytes processed during 100 million hours in one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
We have an incredible new map of the universe before us. The two-dimensional image is the culmination of six years of work from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) legacy image surveys. It is the largest to date in terms of sky coverage, sensitivity, and the total number of galaxies.
How to see the largest map of the universe?
We can see the photo on this website. It contains 10 billion pixels, which is equivalent to 833,000 high-resolution smartphone photos. It was created over the course of 1,405 nights of observation at three observatories: Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and NASA‘s Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE), in addition to the work of 150 observers and 50 other researchers. The result is spectacular.
Considering that for millennia, humans have used maps to understand and navigate our world, astronomical maps also serve this purpose, but on a large scale: they place us within the cosmos and tell the story and destiny of the universe and its process of accelerated expansion.
What is the next step for the astronomers?
The map of the current universe just presented, which covers half of the sky, has been made in 2D, but this work is only the beginning. Now, from the more than 1 billion galaxies that we can find on the map, astronomers will select tens of millions (35 million galaxies and 2.4 million quasars) for further study with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), in order to build the largest 3D map ever made, something that will provide us with new data about the nature of dark energy, that elusive form of energy that would be pushing to accelerate the expansion of the universe.
Over the next five years, experts will measure the distance of these galaxies and quasars, some of which are expected to be 12 billion light-years away. The ultimate goal will be the creation of this giant three-dimensional map of the universe, which will give us a much clearer picture of the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos and the speed at which the universe is expanding.
“To solve some of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics today, we are driven to create huge digital databases of stars and galaxies, which in turn enable a new data-mining approach to making additional astronomical discoveries,” said Adam Bolton, NOIRLab Science, and Data Center Community Director and co-author of the research.