Scientists Release Largest Map of the Universe for Public Exploration

Astronomers have completed the creation of the most extensive three-dimensional map of the universe to date. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project has released the final data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, providing the public with a free digital tool to explore the cosmos.

Located on a mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the DESI instrument spent five years mapping the sky. This effort built upon 13 years of prior groundwork, involving more than 160 scientists who produced over 1,800 scientific papers. The resulting dataset contains 5.6 trillion pixels and catalogs approximately 4 billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids.

The map covers roughly 75 percent of the entire sky, capturing both visible light and near-infrared wavelengths. To achieve such clarity, researchers aimed the instrument’s 5,000 mechanical fibers away from the dense plane of the Milky Way, avoiding the obscuring effects of star dust and matter that typically challenge ground-based astronomy.

This visual archive complements earlier DESI findings released this year, which tracked the distances of 47 million galaxies and quasars to reconstruct 11 billion years of cosmic history. By analyzing how these objects move away from us, scientists hope to understand dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerated expansion.

“It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-lead of the Legacy Surveys. “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.”

Preliminary data from the first three years of DESI’s survey, combined with observations of supernovae and residual radiation from the Big Bang, suggests that dark energy may not be a constant force but is instead gradually weakening over time.