biggest map of the universe

it's exciting, so I feel like I have to post this, although I really don't understand it.

Astronomers (or is it astrologers ...?) have completed the largest map of the universe to date.

I can't show you what it looks like, cuz it's massive and it's 3-D, but here's what goes on:

Using the light of distant, dying galaxies, astronomers have produced the largest, three-dimensional map of the universe yet. Encompassing roughly 600,000 so-called luminous red galaxies--ancient galaxies with only old, red stars left that are uniquely brilliant--the map extends 5.6 billion light-years out into space, or 40 percent of the way to the edge of the visible universe.

Astrophysicists Nikhil Padmanabhan of Princeton University and David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories led a team of international colleagues that painstakingly surveyed the color and redshift of 10,000 of these unique galaxies. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico and from a telescope in Australia, the researchers were able to map a fan-shaped slice of the cosmos that covers a tenth of the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. They then applied these measurements to the broader sample to create their three-dimensional map.

The third and fourth words in the next paragraph are "statistical" and "uncertainty" so my brain turned off and the rest of it reads like "blah blah blah ..." Does anyone out there know a good way to deal with science block? It's a big liability for a science fiction writer.

Comments

[Catholicgauze]

What's a map with large spaces without "Here by Space Dragons"?

[claire]

we haven't seen the map yet. maybe they already put them in!