If you were dropped off in space, could you find your way back to Earth? Well now, you just might be able to. Astronomers from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) have now publicly released a 3-D map of more than 500,000 galaxies and 100,000 quasars. The researchers hope that the map can help explain the history of the universe, as well as uncover more about dark matter and dark energy.
"What really makes me proud of this survey is our commitment to creating a legacy for the future," said team member Michael Blanton, a professor at New York University.
The newly released data, dubbed "Data Release 9" (DR9), builds on an earlier image of the sky released by SDSS-III. Last year, the team released an image that covered one-third of the night sky, and DR9 expands that. The team hopes to continue making more data public, so that amateurs and other astronomers alike will be able to experience and study the vast multitude of the universe.
The map is the result of a SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The survey hopes to eventually identify and map out the positions of 1.5 million galaxies over the past seven billion years as well as over 160,000 quasars over the past 12 billion years. This kind of look back in time will allow the astronomers to construct a better understanding of the universe's expansion, which in turn can help explain some properties of dark matter and dark energy.
"Dark matter and dark energy are two of the greatest mysteries of our time," said David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led the SDSS-III effort to map these galaxies and quasars. "We hope that our new map of the universe can help someone solve the mystery."
Dark matter is mysterious, untouchable and invisible and makes up somewhere around 85 percent of the mass in the universe. It is believed to have played an important role in the formation of galaxies due to stars clustering around great clumps of dark matter. The sparsely-populated regions of space are due to less dark matter concentrations, or so the theory goes.
Dark energy, on the other hand, is mostly known as the cause of the expansion of the universe. This mysterious, expanding energy, is believed to make up around 75 percent of all mass-energy in the universe.
Watch a video showcasing Data Release 8:
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