The most detailed 3D picture of the universe comes out: the dark energy spectrometer tells you how many planets there are in the universe.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL or LBL), one of the most outstanding national laboratories in the United States, released the most detailed 3D map of the universe on Thursday.

This picture is the final result of the 7-month space survey project of Dark Energy Spectrometer (DESI). The dark energy spectrometer in the picture accurately maps the position of galaxies over time to help scientists better understand dark energy.

In this picture, the positions of 7.5 million galaxies are accurately displayed. Each point in the image represents a single galaxy, and each galaxy consists of 1 0 billion to1trillion stars.

This map shows the scene of 5 billion light-years from Earth to Virgo, moving slowly towards the constellation Boetes.

"It has many wonderful places," said Julian Guy, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab. There are huge clusters, filaments and gaps in the distribution of galaxies in the three-dimensional map. They are the largest structures in the universe. But in them, you will find the imprint of the early universe and the history of the expansion of the universe since then. "

This is just the beginning of DESI's work, because the goal of this project is to add more than one million new galaxies to the chart every month. When completed in 2026, the map is expected to include more than 35 million galaxies, providing astronomers with a large amount of data for research.

The Dark Energy Spectrometer (DESI) is a state-of-the-art detector connected to the 4-meter-long Nicholas U. Dietary Telescope in Kit Peak, Arizona. It consists of 5000 optical fibers, accurately located in the range of 10 micron, and it can capture the light from space to the earth, covering more than one third of the whole sky.

The detector is looking for ripples in the distribution of galaxies called baryon acoustic oscillations, which were baked into the distribution of matter in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

Then the question comes: How many planets are there in the universe?