By Isobel Williams via SWNS
New data has allowed scientists to look 11 billion years into the past and create a 3D map of how our universe expanded.
The amazing results come after just one year in operation of a device that uses 5,000 tiny robots within a mountaintop telescope to glimpse into the vastness of space.
The device, called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), uses light reflections from objects in space to map out the cosmos across history.
DESI has created the largest 3D map of our cosmos ever constructed and the most precise, being the first time in history that scientists have measured past expansion with more than one percent accuracy.
The results are from the first year of a five year survey.
The study, posted on arXiv and in talks at the American Physical Society meeting in the United States and the Rencontres de Moriond in Italy suggests that it could be time to update our current model of the universe, known as Lambada CDM, as DESI has some subtle differences in its predictions.
Within one year of use DESI has become twice as powerful at measuring expansion than its predecessor, which took more than a decade.
Dr. Julien Guy from Berkeley lab, California, said: “The dataset we are collecting is exceptional, as is the rate at which we are gathering it.
“This is the most precise measurement I have ever done in my life.
“Understanding how our universe has evolved is tied to how it ends, and to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy, the unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster.”
The project was a large international collaboration involving more than 900 researchers from across the world, but the device itself is housed atop the US National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-metre Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
Dr. Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, also from Berkeley Lab, added: “No spectroscopic experiment has had this much data before, and we’re continuing to gather data from more than a million galaxies every month.
“It’s astonishing that with only our first year of data, we can already measure the expansion history of our universe at seven different slices of cosmic time, each with a precision of one to three per cent.
“The team put in a tremendous amount of work to account for instrumental and theoretical modelling intricacies, which gives us confidence in the robustness of our first results.”
To get these precise readings DESI analyzed a faint pattern of 3D ripples, or bubbles, in galaxies – a feature called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs).
These BAOs comes from pressure waves moving particles into a pattern of ripples, which the team describe as similar to what you’d see if you tossed a handful of gravel into a pond.
These ripples were frozen as the universe expanded and cooled and can still be seen today.
The research team used these BAO measurements as a “cosmic ruler”, mapping the BAO bubbles to determine how fast the universe was expanding at each phase of its past.
Professor Hee-Jong Seo from Ohio University said: “We’ve measured the expansion history over this huge range of cosmic time with a precision that surpasses all of the previous BAO surveys combined.
“We’re very excited to learn how these new measurements will improve and alter our understanding of the cosmos.
“Humans have a timeless fascination with our universe, wanting to know both what it is made of and what will happen to it.”
However, at a certain point the light from typical galaxies becomes too faint, leading the researchers to also study quasars– extremely distant and bright galactic cores with black holes at their centers.
The scientists used 450,000 quasars for their study which is the largest set ever collected.
US Department of Energy associate director Gina Rameika said: “We are delighted to see cosmology results from DESI’s first year of operations.
“DESI continues to amaze us with its stellar performance and is already shaping our understanding of the universe.”
The team note that these findings are just the beginning, with hopes that future research could add to the map.
They plan to map three million quasars and 37 million galaxies by the end of their project.
Dr. Michael Levi, DESI director and a scientist at Berkeley Lab said: “We’re incredibly proud of the data, which have produced world-leading cosmology results and are the first to come out of the new generation of dark energy experiments.
“So far, we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time.
“Those may or may not go away with more data, so we’re excited to start analyzing our three-year dataset soon.”
Dr. Arnaud de Mattia from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission added: “We are in the golden era of cosmology, with large-scale surveys ongoing and about to be started, and new techniques being developed to make the best use of these datasets.
“We’re all really motivated to see whether new data will confirm the features we saw in our first-year sample and build a better understanding of the dynamics of our universe.”
