Map Of Local Void Of The Milky Way Created

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A map of an extensive empty region they called the Local Void that borders the Milky Way galaxy has been created by an international team of astronomers led by Brent Tully, astronomer from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA).

The map – an extensive empty region called the Local Void that borders the Milky Way galaxy – reveals more of the vast cosmic structure surrounding our Milky Way galaxy.

The existence of the Local Void has been widely accepted, but it remained poorly studied because it lies behind the center of our galaxy and is therefore heavily obscured from our view.

The team has measured the motions of 18,000 galaxies in the Cosmicflows-3 compendium of galaxy distances, constructing a cosmographic map that highlights the boundary between the collection of matter and the absence of matter that defines the edge of the Local Void.

Using the observations of galaxy motions, they infer the distribution of mass responsible for that motion, and construct three-dimensional maps of our local Universe.

A smoothed rendition of the structure surrounding the Local Void. Our Milky Way galaxy lies at the origin of the red-green-blue orientation arrows (each 200 million lightyears in length). We are at a boundary between a large, low density void, and the high density Virgo cluster. 
Credit: R. Brent Tully

For 30 years, astronomers have been trying to identify why the motions of the Milky Way, our nearest large galaxy neighbor Andromeda, and their smaller neighbors deviate from the overall expansion of the Universe by over 600 km/s (1.3 million mph).

The new study shows that roughly half of this motion is generated “locally” from the combination of a pull from the massive nearby Virgo Cluster and our participation in the expansion of the Local Void as it becomes ever emptier.

Representations of the void can be seen in a video (below) and, alternatively, with an interactive model (below). With the interactive model, a viewer can pan, zoom, rotate, and pause/activate the time evolution of movement along orbits. The orbits are shown in a reference frame that removes the overall expansion of the universe. What we are seeing are the deviations from cosmic expansion caused by the interactions of local sources of gravity.

source

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff