BOSS Uses Quasars to Measure Structure of Distant Universe (IMAGE)

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

BOSS Uses Quasars to Measure Structure of Distant Universe

Caption

An artist's conception of how BOSS uses quasars to measure the distant universe. Light from distant quasars is partly absorbed by intervening gas, which is imprinted with a subtle ring-like pattern of known physical scale. Astronomers have now measured this scale with an accuracy of two percent, precisely measuring how fast the universe was expanding when it was just 3 billion years old.

Credit

Illustration by Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Andreu Font-Ribera, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, Berkeley Lab.

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