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The largest three-dimensional map of galaxies in the nearby universe has been released by an international team of astronomers. It may shed light on the nature and distribution of dark matter, which cannot be seen but appears to outweigh ordinary matter by a factor of six to one.
The map probes galaxies out to 600 million light years from Earth. Other surveys have studied more distant objects, but none have explored such a wide region of space. "It covers the whole sky," says team member John Huchra, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "That's what really makes it different." Watch a slideshow of the new survey, showing cosmic structures at varying distances (QuickTime or Windows Media Player). The map may give scientists a better clue as to where the Milky Way may be heading. Our galaxy's motion cannot be explained simply by the general expansion of the universe, and researchers have long been trying to find the object or objects that are tugging on it. It may be pulled toward one or more superclusters, which each contain tens of thousands of galaxies. Great Attractor Some previous studies have suggested the most massive object in the observable universe is exerting the most influence on our galaxy's motion. This is a supercluster called........ Continue Reading |
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