Astronomers have constructed the first map of the Universe based on the positions of supermassive black holes, which reveals the large-scale structure of the Universe.

The map precisely measures the expansion history of the Universe back to when the Universe was less than three billion years old. It will help improve our understanding of ‘Dark Energy’, the unknown process that is causing the Universe’s expansion to speed up.

The map was created by scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an international collaboration including astronomers from the University of Portsmouth.

As part of the SDSS Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), scientists measured the positions of quasars – extremely bright discs of matter swirling around supermassive black holes at the centres of distant galaxies. The light reaching us from these objects left at a time when the Universe was between three and seven billion years old, long before the Earth even existed.

The map findings confirm the standard model of cosmology that researchers have built over the last 20 years. In this model, the Universe follows the predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity but includes components that, while we can measure their effects, we do not understand what is causing them.

Along with the ordinary matter that makes up stars and galaxies, Dark Energy is the dominant component at the present time, and it has special properties that mean that it causes the expansion of the Universe to speed up.