Calculating what's in the universe from the biggest color 3-D map

Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their SDSS colleagues, working with DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) based at Berkeley Lab, have used this visual information for the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together – from a time when the universe was only half its present age until now.