Carnegie: "Elegant" Solution to the Structure of the Universe

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Carnegie: "Elegant" Solution to the Structure of the Universe

Post by bystander » Tue Apr 28, 2020 2:31 pm

"Elegant" Solution Reveals How the Universe Got Its Structure
Carnegie Institution for Science | 2020 Apr 27
The universe is full of billions of galaxies—but their distribution across space is far from uniform. Why do we see so much structure in the universe today and how did it all form and grow?

A 10-year survey of tens of thousands of galaxies made using the Magellan Baade Telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile provided a new approach to answering this fundamental mystery. ...

The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey was designed to study the relationship between galaxy growth and the surrounding environment over the last 9 billion years, when modern galaxies’ appearances were defined.

The first galaxies were formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which started the universe as a hot, murky soup of extremely energetic particles. As this material expanded outward from the initial explosion, it cooled, and the particles coalesced into neutral hydrogen gas. Some patches were denser than others and, eventually, their gravity overcame the universe’s outward trajectory and the material collapsed inward, forming the first clumps of structure in the cosmos.

The density differences that allowed for structures both large and small to form in some places and not in others have been a longstanding topic of fascination. But until now, astronomers’ abilities to model how structure grew in the universe over the last 13 billion years faced mathematical limitations. ...

Gravity and the Nonlinear Growth of Structure in the Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey ~ Daniel D. Kelson et al
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