Fly through of the GAMA Galaxy Catalogue

When I’m struggling to find time to do a proper blog post I’m always grateful that I work in cosmology because nearly every day there’s something interest to post. I’m indebted to Andy Lawrence for bring the following wonderful video to my attention. It comes from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly Survey (or GAMA Survey for short), a spectroscopic survey of around 300,000 galaxies in a region of the sky comprising about 300 square degrees;  the measured redshifts of the galaxies enable their three-dimensional positions to be plotted. The video shows the shape of the survey volume before showing what the distribution of galaxies in space looks like as you fly through. Note that the galaxy distances are to scale, but the image of each galaxy is magnified to make it easier to see; the real Universe is quite a lot emptier than this in that the separation between galaxies is larger relative to their size.

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