IT IS the most detailed map of its kind ever created, showing 110,000 "nearby" galaxies, within 2 billion light years of our world.

Every dot is "another Milky Way, with billions of stars," said Heath Jones, the leader of a team of Australian astronomers that spent 10 years undertaking the survey in an effort to unravel one of modern astronomy's biggest mysteries.

The galaxy we live in is at the centre of the pattern, mapped by Dr Chris Fluke, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology.

It is not just the economies of the world that are collapsing. Far out in space, countless galaxies are plunging towards each other at speeds that cannot be explained by the collective gravitational tug of their stars.

Scientists suspect the mysterious pulling power is dark matter - so called because, despite making up the majority of the stuff in the universe, it is invisible.