For the last five years, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has been systematically scanning the night sky. Today marks the completion of its first map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made.
Included in the map are more than 47 million galaxies and quasars — bright galaxy cores that surround active supermassive black holes — as well as 20 million nearby stars within the Milky Way. It's an astounding accomplishment, and the instrument has outperformed even the best expectations of the scientists leading the endeavour.
“The first five years of DESI operations have already produced transformative scientific results,” says Dr. Will Percival, a professor at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute, and co-spokesperson for the experiment. “DESI is 20 times better than any previous facility at mapping the universe in 3D and has produced the incredible map shown in the images below. The positions of the galaxies shown encode many physical processes at work in the universe, allowing us to understand it in a myriad of new ways.”
Read more in the Waterloo News article, "Forget the Hitchhiker's Guide - here's the real map of the Universe".