Word: huchra
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...astronomy's ignorance is rapidly being dispelled, thanks in large part to two researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Since 1985, Margaret Geller and John Huchra have been meticulously crafting a three-dimensional map that charts the positions of thousands of galaxies. Last week, in the journal Science, they presented their latest map of one small chunk of the visible universe, and the findings are startling...
...galaxies, as the textbooks have long assumed, the cosmos seems to be organized into immense bubbles, each of them about 150 million light-years across. The walls of the bubbles are galaxies, and the interiors appear to be virtually empty. Most surprising of all is a feature Geller and Huchra call the "Great Wall" -- a sheet of galaxies at least 200 million light-years wide, 500 million long and perhaps 15 million thick. It looks like a single structure, but the scientists say it may instead be made up of the walls of adjacent bubbles. Says Geller: "Because it runs...
...only through years of data that these conclusions could have been ultimately made," Huchra said. The astronomer said that when their project ends in 1992-93, he and Geller will have mapped more than 15,000 distant galaxies...
...gravity required to bring together the matter in these massive, well-defined galaxies needs to have been acting for more than 15 billion years, Huchra said...
Geller and Huchra said the next step in determining the age of the universe is to construct a national observatory containing a computerized system that would scan the skies and measure the distances of remote galaxies...