Scientists led by Anze Slosar, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), have completed the largest three-dimensional map of the distant Universe after making observations of light emitted from 14,000 quasars passing through clouds of interstellar gas. The map is the first glimpse into what the Universe looked like 11 billion years ago.
This map shows a slice through the 3D map created by Slosar and his team with BOSS, with red highlighting regions with more gas; blue with less gas. The cross-hatched areas are those not observed by BOSS. We are at the bottom tip of the wedge, looking out through individual galaxies into these distant gas clouds illuminated by quasars, spectacularly bright sources of light created by material flowing into black holes. Image: Slosar and the SDSS-III collaboration.
BOSS is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an international survey that focuses on observing objects outside of our own Milky Way and mapping out the largest structures in the Universe. Its previous data releases have unmasked large regions of the sky, but this result is based data that has been collected from the deepest reaches of space.
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