The universe has been measured to an "accuracy of one percent."
The announcement was made by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Collaboration; the finding could bring researchers a step closer to understanding dark energy, a DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory news release reported.
"One-percent accuracy in the scale of the universe is the most precise such measurement ever made," BOSS's principal investigator, David Schlegel, a member of the Physics Division of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) said. "Twenty years ago astronomers were arguing about estimates that differed by up to fifty percent. Five years ago, we'd refined that uncertainty to five percent; a year ago it was two percent. One-percent accuracy will be the standard for a long time to come."
The researchers used the Sloan Foundation Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory to record "high-precision spectra" of over a million galaxies that reached back six billion years into the past. The galaxies contained redshifts from 0.2 to 0.7.
"We believe the BOSS database includes more redshifts of galaxies than collected by all the other telescopes in the world."
The team will continue to gather data until this coming June, but they decided to perform the analysis early since they already had 90 percent of their information.
Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) are "the regular clustering of galaxies, whose scale provides a 'standard ruler' to measure the evolution of the universe's structure," the news release reported. These measurements can help us understand phenomena such as how "dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe."
The researchers compared their measurements with recent data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and supernova measures of accelerating expansion to make their findings. The team believes their research suggest "dark energy is a cosmological constant whose strength does not vary in space or time." They also concluded that space is "not curved much."
"One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite," Schlegel said. "That means -- while we can't say with certainty that it will never come to an end -- it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe."
