If driving really fast through the snow at night with your headlights on just doesn’t do it for you anymore (or has resulted in too many accidents), here’s a video of what it would look like if you could fly through the universe at warp speed. As an added bonus, the galaxies are enlarged so you can see them all and pretend you’re some kind of giant space monster.
The video is part of new research recently published in arXiv from a team led by Ph. D. candidate Mehmet Alpaslan of St Andrews University in Scotland. Alpaslan and the rest of the team used Australia’s Anglo-Australian Telescope to take the biggest ever census of the southern sky, to which the universe probably responded by ranting about “big brother” and putting on a tin foil hat.
Their work has shown that, in what were previously thought to be empty “voids” in the vast cosmic web of galaxies throughout the universe, there are actually thin strands of dim galaxies that the team is calling “tendrils.”
The tendrils only contain a handful of galaxies when compared to larger galaxy clusters, but their dim nature makes it hard to get an accurate count, so the team notes that they may contain higher galaxy densities than we can detect at this point.
Here’s a video of the same galaxy mapping with an explanation of the findings:
(via Universe Today and Space.com, image ICRAR via Vimeo)
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