WATERLOO — You won't find any capitals, highways or rests stops on this map, but to astrophysicists, it's the most detailed guide to exploration they've ever had.

Three researchers from the University of Waterloo, along with a French counterpart, have built a 3D map of the universe that spans almost two billion light years across. It's the most comprehensive picture of the cosmos assembled yet, and could help scientists better understand how matter is distributed throughout the galaxies.

"We're closing in on the mystery of the peculiar motions (of the universe) and dark matter and the link between the two," said professor Mike Hudson, associate dean of science, computing at Waterloo.

Along with Jonathan Carrick and Stephen Turnbull, colleagues in Waterloo's department of physics and astronomy, and French researcher Guilhem Lavaux, the group compiled over a decade's worth of data from telescopes on opposite ends of the planet.

They spent more than three years assembling those images into a complex map that approximates the rough direction of the universe's many clusters of galaxies, the speed of their expansion, and distance from Earth.

SG Scan 400kms smoothing from Guilhem Lavaux on Vimeo.

Their work was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a leading research journal for astrophysics.

The scale of the map itself is mind-boggling, considering there are billions of galaxies in the universe, and they're all expanding at different speeds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is expanding at an estimated rate of 600 kilometres per second.

"It's been a huge effort. Different groups have spent years looking at different parts of the sky, and we collected that data," said Hudson, who is also an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

"All these other groups were like explorers who went off in different directions and brought back their pieces of data. We assembled it into one coherent map."

He describes the mapping project a bit like measuring an infinitely large loaf of raisin bread in the oven, where the raisins, or galaxies, are spreading apart from each other as they're baked. The only problem is the universe is kind of like a poorly-mixed loaf — some parts expand more than others.

"It's not quite perfectly uniform, and it's that imperfect uniformity that we're studying by making these maps," Hudson said. "Our goal was to understand how lumpy the universe is, and how that affects the overall expansion."

The hope is this new galactic map can help astrophysicists better understand the location and concentration of dark matter — clusters of invisible particles that can't actually be seen, but can be measured through their gravitational pull on other objects.

It's believed dark matter slows down the expansion of the universe in some areas, acting as a beacon, Hudson said. It's a way to measure something that can't otherwise be measured, he said.

The next step will be expanding the map to three or four billion light years across, which could help unlock the secrets around why some galaxies seem to be getting "pulled" more than others, he said.

"By doing this map, we've explained most of that motion but not all of it yet. We have to go deeper still," he said. "We want to see if we can understand all of it. There may be other galaxies out there that we haven't mapped yet that are accounting for this extra pull."

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SG Scan 1000kms smoothing from Guilhem Lavaux on Vimeo.