Brilliant 10: Anže Slosar Maps Matter At The Edge Of The Universe
Anže Slosar Marius BuggeThe earliest substance ever. The oldest part of the universe, more than 10 billion light years away, bursts with super-luminous quasars and diffuse aggregations of hydrogen gas. Anže Slosar, a cosmologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, wants to map that expanse in 3-D. Slosar looks for and then plots patterns in the periodic density fluctuations of matter that coalesced after the big bang. Others have mapped this structure to six billion light years away by observing how galaxies cluster, but at the universe's far edges, galaxies are too faint to see. To overcome this challenge, Slosar uses a new technique that many were skeptical would even work: Instead of plotting light visible to humans, he and his collaborators look at the shadows Anže SlosarAge 34Brookhaven National Laboratorythat massive gas clouds create when they obstruct light from the faraway quasars. For the first several months, the...