Astronomers have mapped more than a billion galaxies. This makes it the largest map of the celestial sky ever. It is the starting shot of five years of searching for dark matter.
The map consists of 10 trillion pixels. To give you an idea, the pixel count is about 833000 photos of a smartphone with HD camera. Astronomers have collected images from the Kit Peak National Observatory and the Cerro Tololo Pan American Observatory. The news was announced on a Meeting From the American Astronomical Society.
As impressive as it may be, the map is only the first step. The real goal is to recognize the mysterious dark energy in our universe. This energy comes from astronomers’ calculations and observations, but they still have a pretty good idea of what exactly it is.
From one billion galaxies on the map, they will now select “small” from 35 million galaxies and 2.4 million quasars. They want to use DESI to perform the largest 3D reconstruction of a part of the universe ever. Hopefully, that will solve the mystery of dark matter.
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