Map of the positions of thousands of galaxies in the VIPERS survey

This map of a section of the Universe shows the positions of thousands of galaxies that were measured as part of the VIPERS survey with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The observer on the Earth is at the left and galaxies towards the right are seen at earlier times in the history of the Universe. Redshift 0.65 corresponds to looking back about six billion years and redshift 1.0 to about eight billion years ago. The colours indicate the true colours of the galaxies — red objects are red elliptical galaxies and blue are star-forming spiral galaxies. The sizes of the blobs indicate the brightness of the galaxies. The complex structure of the large-scale structure of the cosmic web is clearly seen.