Australian study backs major assumption of cosmology
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Vignettes from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
The 3.9 meter (12.8 foot) Anglo-Australian telescope, the last major telescope made with an equatorial mount (Photo: Australian Astronomical Observatory)
All-sky map of the cosmic microwave background from data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - the colors indicate differences of energy of about 0.01 percent (Photo: NASA)
The universe within a billion light years of Earth, showing local superclusters of galaxies - approximately 63 million galaxies are shown (Image: Richard Powell)
On the left appears a fractal having a two-dimensional structure not unlike the filamentary structure of the Universe. On the right appears the same fractal averaged over regions having about one-tenth of the area of the original (Image: Brian Dodson)
The filamentary structure of the Universe modeled based on observed mass distribution and the evolution of dark matter from the beginning of the Universe (Image: ESA)
Current consensus on the overall history of the Universe (Image: NASA)
Map of the region of the Universe within two billion light years of Earth. Blue indicates a low density of galaxies, while red indicates a high density. Filaments and very large walls are visible (Image: Australian Astronomical Observatory)
All-sky near infrared survey showing nearby large-scale structure in distribution of galaxies (Image: Australian Astronomical Observatory)
All-sky view of the brightest 60,000 galaxies in the night sky (Image: Australian Astronomical Observatory)
Article Summary
In mankind's attempts to gain some understanding of this marvelous place in which we live, we have slowly come to accept some principles to help guide our search. One such principle is that the Universe, on a large enough scale, is homogeneous, meaning that one part looks pretty much like another. Recent studies by a group of Australian researchers have established that, on sizes greater than about 250 million light years (Mly), the Universe is indeed statistically homogeneous, thereby reinforcing this cosmological principle.
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