Astronomers have announced the most precise results on the expansion of the universe and dark energy yet. This feat was possible by using Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an automated system, which has collected data on 1.2 million galaxies.

Hundreds of scientists from all over the world collaborated to create the largest-ever three-dimensional map of the cosmos, looking at galaxies between 2 and 7 billion light-years away.

“We have spent a decade collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one-quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light-years,” said Jeremy Tinker of New York University, a co-leader of the scientific team that led this effort, in a statement.

“This map has allowed us to make the best measurements yet of the effects of dark energy in the expansion of the universe. We are making our results and map available to the world.”

Fantastic video.

The Local Group itself seems to be a gravitationally bound outlier member of the even larger Virgo Supercluster. So far, superclusters appear to be the largest known organization of matter in the universe, although there is reason to believe there are higher levels above that; super-super clusters and so on.

At the largest scales, these megaclusters seem to exhibit a filamentary structure, large bubbles and shells of clusters of galaxies, with vast voids in between and around them. Its like soap suds, a foam reminiscent of quantum foam, and these vast megastructures seem to be the result of inhomogeneities in the expanding debris from the Big Bang, which may be in turn an artifact of small scale fluctuations in the matter of the expanding early universe.

We are somewhere in the middle realm, between the really big and the really small, although exactly where is not clear. But just our galaxy alone is a structure of vast complexity and intricate organization, an integrated phenomenon of stars, gas and dust clouds, gravitational and magnetic waves, chemical gradients, shock fronts. and even acoustic phenomena. And no two galaxies are identical, they undergo a complex evolution, and often interact with one another gravitationally and with collisions.

All we really need is a wet and rocky planet orbiting a G main sequence subdwarf. Why all this infrastructure? Are we the reason for all this? Or are we just an accidental by-product? I tend to lean towards the latter.

Dark matter & energy, perhaps?

http://cosmicweb.uchicago.edu/index.html