Scientists led by a team from the University of Chicago recently released a study that mapped some of the largest known objects in the universe.

The study may help scientists test theories about how the universe first formed, and the rules that govern it.

According to an Oct. 21 news release from the U of C, the scientists used data from the Dark Energy Survey — a project headed up by the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. The project catalogued the sky for six years from atop a mountain in Chile, the university said.

Using this data, the scientists were able to survey the largest objects in the universe. Much like a house on Blackstone Avenue right off 57th Street is one of many in Hyde Park, which in turn is one of many neighborhoods within the City of Chicago and so on, the Earth itself is tucked away in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is within its own neighborhood containing about 50 other galaxies.

Galaxies often clump together in such "neighborhoods," scientists have found. The cluster of which the Milky Way is a part is one of the smaller ones, but others are gargantuan, amounting to some of the most massive objects in the universe, the university said.

Scientists hoped to study the clusters to learn about other big questions with regard to the universe, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Such forces cannot be seen directly, but they do push galaxies together and apart, respectively, the university said.

It is easier to see the effects of dark matter and dark energy on massive objects such as galaxy clusters than it would be on smaller objects due to the clusters' mass, the U of C said.

But other studies hit roadblocks. Sometimes, galaxy clusters would be hidden behind each other and thus not visible, and thus, calculations were thrown off, the release said.

"Because clusters are such a sensitive measuring stick, if we tallied less clusters, for example, we would conclude a different amount of dark matter in the universe," Chihway Chang, one of the senior authors of the study and associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago, said in the release.

But Chang and co-author Chun-Hao To, a postdoctoral fellow at UChicago, said they have been able to correct for such roadblocks.

Their research adds a data point called "S8 tension," which quantifies how "clumpy" the universe is, or how much structure it has, UChicago said.

In previous studies using a different technique, scientists calculated S8 as being slightly lower than what can be inferred from the earlier universe. If this had meant the universe had more structure in the past than it does today, it would have suggested holes in the ΛCDM (Lambda-CDM) model of understanding the universe — the best current theoretical framework to describe the universe using dark energy (Λ) and cold dark matter (CDM).

But the analysis of galaxy clusters found that the S8 value of "clumpiness" today is consistent with the one from the early universe, supporting the ΛCDM model after all, the U of C said.

The next generation of large telescopes should greatly expand the number of galaxy clusters that can be mapped, the university said.

The study involved 66 members of the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration from more than 50 institutions, including Fermilab and the Argonne National Laboratory.