An international team of astronomers has released the largest three-dimensional map of galaxies in the nearby universe. It may shed light on the nature and distribution of dark matter, which cannot be seen but appears to outweigh ordinary matter by a factor of six to one. The images were produced through the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS), which mapped the distances to about 25,000 galaxies by how much their light had been stretched, or “redshifted”, by the expansion of the universe. The colours and two-dimensional positions of the galaxies in the sky had been taken from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS).
What really makes it different is that it covers the whole sky. The map may give scientists a better clue as to where the Milky Way may be heading.
The map probes galaxies out to 600 million light years from Earth. No survey has explored such a wide region of space ever. The new map suggests a closer, less massive supercluster called the Great Attractor that has the largest “pull” over the Milky Way. The superclusters observed in this survey cannot totally account for the direction of the Milky Way’s travel.
This yet another landmark reached by the scientists will help us understand much more about our cosmological model and about galaxies themselves.
Via: newscientistspace
