Maps presented as a video provide a three dimensional representation of the universe through the use of rotation, panning, and zooming facilities. The Cosmic Flows project has mapped visible and invisible matter around the Milky Way up to a distance of 300 million light years, a complex web of clusters, filaments, and voids. Large voids, or empty spaces, are surrounded by filaments that form superclusters of galaxies. Just as the movement of tectonic plates can be reconstructed on a computer screen to reveal the properties of the interior of the Earth, the movements of galaxies plotted on a computer screen reveal information about the main constituents of the universe – darker energy and dark matter included. Is this a kind of circular reasoning?
We may note that Plate Tectonics does not really reveal the secrets of the Earth's interior – that is imagining. Does this mapping of the universe simply reproduce the consensus cosmological model?The article is at www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/06/cosmic-flows-mapping-the-movements… . The article to accompany the video can be viewed at http://arxiv.org 'Cosmography of the Local Universe'.