The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has come up with latest data in the form of the biggest three-dimensional map of our universe until now. It’s a map of 1.2 million galaxies spread over one fourth of the sky and over a volume of space of 650 cubic billion light-years.

For a decade, hundreds of scientists worked hand in hand to make the map and use its data for the formation of one of the most exact measurements of dark energy, the confusing force resulting into an accelerating growth of our universe, so far.

A compilation of papers explaining the results was submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week.

Jose Vazquez of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a scientist involved in the work, and searched for proof of unexplained physical phenomena in the results, said that he didn’t detect any.

In a statement from SDSS-III, he commented that the latest have tied into a clean cosmological picture, providing strength to the standard cosmological model, emerged in the past 18 years.

In other words, he said that present theories of cosmologists, who have given the picture of the universe on the biggest possible scales, are alive and well.

As a whole, the new map is helpful in revealing the huge scale of our universe, which is thought to have over one 100 billion galaxies.

Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program of SDSS-III was behind the measurements that have shed light on the data relating to the galaxies in the map. Their statement explained, “Shaped by a continuous tug-of-war between dark matter and dark energy, the map revealed by BOSS allows astronomers to measure the expansion rate of the universe and thus determine the amount of dark matter and dark energy”.

"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released new data in the form of the largest three-dimensional map of our universe so far. It’s a map of 1.2 million galaxies over a quarter of the sky and over a volume of space of 650 cubic billion light-years. Hundreds of scientists worked together for 10 years to create this map and to use its data to make one of the most precise measurements yet of dark energy, the mysterious force causing an accelerating expansion of our universe. A collection of papers describing these results was submitted this week (July 14, 2016) to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society," according to a news report published by Earth Sky News.

Before we go on, look at the image above and take a moment to think about the universe as a whole, as modern theories describe it. Each dot in the picture at top indicates the position of a galaxy. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the universe 6 billion light-years wide (thus we see some of these galaxies 6 billion years into the past), 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick.

Note that the dots – the galaxies – are highly clustered. Delicate clustering such as this is a key feature of modern cosmological theories, which describe the universe as a vast cosmic web, whose filaments contain huge galaxy superclusters, with voids in between. Modern cosmologists believe this entire structure, the structure of our universe as a whole, was seeded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

According to a story published on the topic by Astronomy, "Hundreds of astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) and the Max Planck Institutes for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and for Astrophysics (MPA) contributed to this map. The astronomers found that the map agrees with the current cosmological model (the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model) and confirmed that dark energy is a cosmological constant."

“We have spent a decade collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light-years,” says Dr. Jeremy Tinker of New York University in a press release.

“However, galaxies also have peculiar motions and the peculiar velocity component along the line-of-sight leads to the so-called redshift space distortion,” says Saito in the same press release.

Their strenuous efforts have paid off as the BOSS data show that dark energy is what is causing the expansion with an error of only 5 percent in the cosmological constant found. The cosmological constant is called Lambda, as coined by Albert Einstein as a repellant effect in the universe. These findings are still consistent with the relatively young theory of the cosmological model.

The map also reveals that galaxies tend to move to areas with more matter, staying true to the laws of gravity as well as the infall of material following the laws of general relativity. This suggests that the idea of the expansion of the universe is caused by a phenomenon like dark energy that works on large cosmic scales and not our theories of gravity breaking down.

A report published in UPI News informed, "Dark energy -- the mysterious force responsible for the expansion of the universe -- remains elusive, but researchers hope a new 3D map of distant galaxies will help them finally measure it."

"The University of Portsmouth has worked with partner institutions for ten years, helping to gather measurements of galaxies making up a quarter of the sky," Beutler said. "Using this map we will now be able to make the most accurate possible measurements of dark energy, and the part it plays in the expansion of the universe."

By measuring the size of baryonic acoustic oscillations within the three-dimensional structure of faraway galaxies, astronomers can more accurately calculate the expansion rate of the universe.

Models of the evolution of the universe suggest dark matter began driving the expansion of the universe some 5 billion years ago. Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey program is designed to focus on sound wave fluctuations between 7 billion and 2 billion years ago.