BY MEASURING the positions of a staggering 106 688 galaxies and their
distances away from us, an international team of astronomers has produced a
three-dimensional mega-map of a swathe of the Universe with a volume of 13
billion billion billion cubic light years. Their estimate of the mass of this
material supports a growing consensus that the Universe will continue expanding
for ever.
Using the Two-degree Field (2dF) spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian
Telescope in New South Wales, the team estimated the distances to the fleeing
galaxies by measuring their red shifts: the stretching of light waves due to the
expansion…
