Ultra-Deep Survey unveils observations of largest ever swath of deep universe

Data on over 250,000 galaxies going back 13 billion years will show how galaxies change over time / UKIDSS

Astrophysicists have released images of the largest swath of the deep universe ever observed. The images gaze 13 billion years back in time and cover an area of the sky four times the size of the full moon.

Omar Almaini, at the University of Nottingham, and colleagues netted infrared observations of 250,000 galaxies, the earliest less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The farther away from Earth you look in the universe, the farther back in time you see.

Read the full story in Astronomy Magazine.

Home is where the Laniakea supercluster is

Laniakea Supercluster. Credit: SDvision interactive visualization software by DP at CEA/Saclay, France.

Our Milky Way galaxy is vast—100,000 light-years across—but even the Milky Way is part of something larger. As astronomers zoom out to larger and larger scales, they see galaxies bunching up into clusters and these clusters into superclusters.

Astronomers have recently mapped our home supercluster and found that it is five times larger than previously thought. The Milky Way is just one peripheral blip out of 100,000 galaxies.

Read the full article in Scope.