The Largest Ever 3-D Map Of The Universe Is Here, And It Is Trippy AF

Do you often wonder what the universe looks like? I’ll be honest, outside of what I’m going to eat for lunch on any given day, that thought probably occupies my mind more than any other.

It’s so big, and no one really knows what the fuck it looks like. Most videos and pictures online don’t do it any justice.

Which is why scientists used data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) to map the universe. The project took five years, as they analyzed the precise measurement of over 1.2 million galaxies.

Are you ready to see it? Get hype.

That picture is just a very small portion of their full map.

[It’s a] billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high and 500 million light-years thick. Containing a mere 48,741 galaxies the image represents just three per cent of the data collected.

And here’s the three-dimensional representation of the universe.

Wanna hear the craziest shit? That map of the universe, which covers 650 billion cubic light years, is just one fucking quarter of the night sky.

Yea. There’s still so much more universe out there. Scientists made the map hoping to better understand dark matter, that mysterious force that permeates the universe.

The map’s primary function is not to show the galaxies themselves but the space in between – the 95 per cent of matter which makes up our universe.

David Schlegel, an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and principal investigator for BOSS explains: “In this map, we can see galaxies being gravitationally pulled towards other galaxies by dark matter. And on much larger scales, we see the effect of dark energy ripping the universe apart.”

Also, it just looks fucking cool.

[Via Huffington Post UK]