Jan 09, 2014 02:05 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Astronomers with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) mapped the distance between galaxies to an accuracy of approximately one percent.

One percent may not seem at first like a great amount of accuracy, but it is actually monumentally precise. Prof David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS, told BBC News that, 20 years ago, the same measurement was believed to have 50 percent accuracy. Last year, it became two percent and now, one percent has become "the standard."

"There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to one percent accuracy," Schlegel said. "One percent accuracy will be the standard for a long time to come."

The discovery was announced at the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) 223rd annual meeting.

Using the Sloan Foundation Telescope in New Mexico, the BOSS team baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) to measure the intergalactic distance.

"Nature has given us a beautiful ruler," Ashley Ross, an astronomer from the University of Portsmouth, told BBC News. "The ruler happens to be half a billion light years long, so we can use it to measure distances precisely, even from very far away."

The new map also gives a shape, of sorts, to the estimated 1.3 million galaxies in the universe. A force known as "dark energy" accelerates the expansion of the universe and its strength does not vary in space or time.

"The answer is, [the universe] is not curved much. The universe is extraordinarily flat," said Prof Schlegel. "And this has implications for whether the universe is infinite.

"While we can't say with certainty, it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe."

Harvard University astronomer Daniel Eisenstein said in a press release the team needed to use a method unlike any they have previously used.

"Making a one-percent measurement at a distance of six billion light-years is a huge step forward," he said, "and it requires a completely different technique from measurements in the solar system or the Milky Way."

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