New Video Map Shows Large-Scale Cosmic Structure out to 300 million Light Years

By Nancy Atkinson - June 12, 2013 at 8:28 PM UTC | Cosmology
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Researchers with the

Cosmic Flows project

have been working to map both visible and dark matter densities around our Milky Way galaxy up to a distance of 300 million light-years, and they've now released this new video map which shows the motions of structures of the nearby Universe in greater detail than ever before.

"The complexity of what we are seeing is almost overwhelming," says researcher Hélène Courtois, associate professor at the University of Lyon, France, and associate researcher at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA), University of Hawaii (UH) at Manoa. Courtois narrates the video.

The video zooms into our local area of the Universe -- our Milky Way galaxy lies in a supercluster of 100,000 galaxies -- and then slowly draws back to show the cosmography of the Universe out to 300 million light years.

The map shows how the large-scale structure of the Universe is a complex web of clusters, filaments, and voids. Large voids are bounded by filaments that form superclusters of galaxies. These are the largest structures in the universe.

The team explains:

The movements of the galaxies reveal information about the main constituents of the Universe: dark energy and dark matter. Dark matter is unseen matter whose presence can be deduced only by its effect on the motions of galaxies and stars because it does not give off or reflect light. Dark energy is the mysterious force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

Read more about this video

here,

and read the

team's paper here.

Cosmography of the Local Universe from Daniel Pomarède on Vimeo.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com