A Slice of the Universe with 2dF
What can 100,000 galaxies tell you?
Perhaps the structure and composition of the universe.
Astronomers using the
Two Degree Field (2dF) spectrograph
on the
Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in
Australia have now measured the
redshifts of over 100,000
galaxies in a thin
ribbon of the sky.
The results show how galaxies are scattered in the
universe out to 4 billion light years.
Huge
clusters, long filaments, and
empty voids measuring over 100 million
light years across are visible in the resulting
2dF map, pictured above.
The map is interesting not only for what it
shows but also for what it does not show.
It does not show even larger
structures that
would be expected were the universe filled to
critical density with normal matter.
These results do not contradict
recent evidence that most of the
universe is made of some type of unusual
dark energy, however.