Sit back and enjoy the view on a journey past every galaxy in astronomers' databases, thanks to this awesome video by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. It’s a simulation, of course; capturing that on film would be quite some feat. The galaxies are shown enlarged for artistic purposes, but with distances to scale.The video was made as part of ICRAR’s work using data from a catalogue of the galaxies called the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, an international project to map the universe and study galaxy formation using both space and ground-based telescopes. It has over 300,000 galaxies in its database.Specifically, astronomers led by Mehmet Alpaslan at the University of Western Australia have been looking at what they call “tendrils” of galaxies in what were thought to be empty voids in space. In work published in the latest Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they note small clusters of galaxies venturing into these sparsely populated regions of the universe.“We found small strings composed of just a few galaxies penetrating into the voids, a completely new type of structure that we’ve called ‘tendrils,’” said Alpaslan. That’s in contrast to the huge clusters of hundreds of galaxies found in other areas of space.While it’s a great discovery—and a cool video—it also highlights how incomplete our current map of the universe is. It’s likely these tendrils exist in other areas the researchers didn’t focus on, and that regions previously thought to be “voids” are in fact home to little hamlets of as-yet-unknown galaxies.We look forward to an updated fly-through simulator as we continue to plot our galactic maps.
Advertisement