While everyone else is busy trying to make a living on Planet Earth, a team of researchers who were working with Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey has finally scaled just how vast and extensive the universe really is.
BOSS, together with the research team came up with an unprecedented measurement, which determined he distance between galaxies that are over 6-billion light years away to a whopping 2% accuracy.
Initially, the research started mapping the locations of over 1.2 million galaxies and the measurements they found was consistent and supportive with that of Albert Einstein's "cosmological constant". The idea of the renowned scientist is that dark matter throughout the universe remains constant throughout history.
In a survey showed in Space.com, researchers believe that between 5 and 7 billion years ago, the universe expansion was a lot slower because of the pull of gravity but in due time, it started speeding up because of the dark matter, which represents over 74% of the universe's energy and mass.
The astronomers from BOSS makes use of a spectrograph on the Sloan Foundation's 2.5-meter telescope in an observatory in New Mexico, where they conduct all their research. On a clear night when everything goes perfectly, we can add more than 8,000 galaxies and quasars to the map," Kaike Pan, one of the leaders in the research states.
Another surprising finding of the research is that the universe appears to be "flat", which now answers and determines the curvature of space, critical to knowing if the universe is infinite or not. Now, the researchers declare it so.
"One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite. That means - while we can't say with certainty that it will never come to an end - it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe," principal investigator David Schlegel says.
These findings are only the beginning, as the researchers aim to reveal more as they continue their research.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
