It was created the most complex map of the Milky Way . It shows that our galaxy is much more extensive than previously thought

Milky Way  (Foto:spaceandintelligence.com) 

Researchers say they underestimated the number of stars existing within our galaxy.

European Space Agency released the most detailed map to date of the Milky Way. The digital representation depicting the positions of no less than 1.142 billion stars, is the first product of Gaia space observatory, launched three years ago. Among the identified cosmic objects there were about 400 million stars unknown, which means that our galaxy is much more extensive than previously thought in the moment.

,, This map released today the extraordinary density of the stars studied by Gaia indicates and confirms that space observatory has collected valuable information in its first year of activity. Although current data are preliminary, we will do our best to put them to the community of astronomers to use them as soon as possible, "says Timo Prussia, a researcher involved in the project Gaia.

Map presented by the European Space Agency experts is the result of the cumulative effort of not less than 450 researchers. Comparing observations with the help of Gaia observer to those shown in the Hipparcos and Tycho catalogs-2, scientists have been able to estimate distances and movements carried about 2 million stars. The result: the most comprehensive picture of the movement of the stars obtained so far.

Map Milky Way obtained by European astronomers (Photo: sciencealert.com/ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

Gaia Space Observatory is located about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and is equipped with a 1 miliiard pixels capable of measuring the diameter of a human hair from a distance of 1,000 kilometers. Vehicle mission will last nearly 5 years and aims at mapping the Milky Way, which astronomers assume that accommodates no less than 100 billion stars.

Although experts are confident that the Centre will not be able to analyze these cosmic objects over 5 years, they say, for now, the result is very good, given that Gaia has begun to map the proper since July 2014.


,, It appears we underestimated the number of stars. We think there are about 2-2.5 billion, "said van Leeuwen Floor, researcher at Cambridge University.

Other articles on the same theme:

• The Milky Way's Halo Spins With The Galaxy
• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter
• 4,000 confirmed exoplanets similar to Earth
• The universe: Reading the future from the distant past

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by sciencealert.com . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

LARGEST MAP EVER MADE WILL UNLOCK THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE 1.2 MILLION GALAXIES

Updated 02/05/2020

"This is one slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy 6 billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side.

Map of the observable universe. (Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia/CC BY 4.0)

Galaxies are highly clustered, revealing superclusters and voids whose presence is seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This image contains 48,741 galaxies, about 3% of the full survey dataset. Grey patches are small regions without survey data."

What you're looking at is a slice of the entire universe, a web of galaxies billions of light years away. You're also looking into the past, since the further into the distance you look, the longer it took that light to reach your eyes. It all seems a lot smaller until you realize that each of those dots is hundreds of thousands of light years across.

A collaboration of hundreds of scientists released the "largest-ever, three-dimensional map of distant galaxies" with over 1.2 million spots as a part of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program using a telescope in New Mexico, according to a press release from Brookhaven National Lab. The map isn't for wanderers; scientists are trying to understand some of the universe's unexplained properties, like what dark matter and dark energy are. Understanding those things requires a three-dimensional map bigger and looking further out than any map scientists have made prior.

"The problem was, if you take data on the brightest galaxies in the sky, they happen to be nearby galaxies," BOSS' principal investigator David Schlegel from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab told Popular Science.

"For a cosmologist, that’s just a map of the backyard. I don’t want a map of the backyard. I want a map of the universe."

Up until fifty or so years ago, scientists more or less understood the universe, said Schlegel. But the discovery of dark matter and dark energy showed we don't really understand most of it, since they make up around 95 percent of the stuff in the universe. Yeah, we don't understand 95 percent of the stuff in the universe.

That's not to say we can't measure or detect dark matter and dark energy, though. If you look at the map, you'll see a web of galaxies and places where dots clump. Dark matter still feels gravity's pull, so galaxies align themselves along the webs and clumps of dark matter. We can detect dark energy too. When we look into space, really distant things we'd expect to look white actually look red; they've been redshifted. That's because their light rays have stretched out, because the space itself the light travels through expands, like a stretched-out tattoo on someone who's gaining a lot of weight.

By measuring really far away things, we found out that the universe wasn't just expanding, but the rate it expanded was actually speeding up. That discovery won a team of scientists the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"I don’t want a map of the backyard. I want a map of the universe."

Map of large universe (Hélène Courtois, Daniel Pomarède, R. Brent Tully, Yehuda Hoffman, and Denis Courtois) smithsonianmag

In one theory of the universe, there's a single number called the "cosmological constant" that says dark energy is a uniform thing permeating the universe and making it expand. Some physicists were hoping that a larger map would show the cosmological constant's value changing in different places, rather than just being a single number everywhere, but the single number stuck throughout the swath of the universe covered by BOSS' results. Schlegel thought theoretical physicists might be a little pigeonholed by the results, since they can do more with varying numbers than a single constant.

Mark Wise, theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology, hadn't reviewed the BOSS results yet but agreed with Schlegel. "It would be more exciting if it was something else," he told Popular Science.

Map of Universe

The BOSS experiment is about more than just dark energy, though, pointed out Anže Slosar, Brookhaven National Lab and BOSS cosmologist who leads his "futile existence as a scientist and a bureaucrat" (much as a cosmologist would), according to his website. The experiment will also help pinpoint the mass of the neutrino particle. Soon, other experiments like the larger Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on a telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona will pick up where the BOSS experiment leaves off. But Slosar was most excited about how intertwined our physical experiences on Earth are with the rest of the universe.

"The fact that it’s the same fundamental laws that guide GPS satellites all the way down to one second after the big bang is pretty mindblowing," he said.

Other articles on the same theme:

• What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

• The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

• NOBEL PHYSICS 2016. Nobel Prize winners are David DJ. Thouless, F. M. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz

The above post is provided by POPULAR SCIENCE.

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