The map describes how ordinary matter is distributed in space up to a distance of about a billion light-years away from us. This survey will help scientists better understand the distribution of dark matter and explain why, to some extent, galaxies are moving erratically with respect to us.

The cosmological principle states that the matter is distributed homogeneously across the universe when seen on a large enough scale. This, however, doesn't mean that the density of the universe is the same at each and every point in space: if that were the case, there would be no galaxies, stars, or planet Earth to speak of.

Rather, what we see are variations that occur with no set pattern, influenced by the gravitational pull of both ordinary and dark matter and forming clusters of galaxies in random directions relative to us. On the whole the fluctuations tend to average out, but in our cosmic neighborhood we still see significant variations.