THE structure of the universe seems to have undergone a dramatic rearrangement a few billion years after its creation. Startling results announced by the most comprehensive galaxy-mapping project ever undertaken suggest that the distribution of matter in the universe shifted suddenly from very dense clusters, to being much more evenly dispersed. The finding leaves astronomers at a loss to explain what could have caused the change.
Researchers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are using a pair of dedicated telescopes at Apache Point, New Mexico, to create a detailed three-dimensional map of the position and brightness of 100 million objects,…
