Hawking to announce plans to map entire known universe

Stephen Hawking, one of the world's best-known physicists, is set to announce plans to map the entire known universe using a supercomputing centre he founded at Cambridge University.

The Cosmos computer will plot the position and movement of billions of galaxies, black holes, supernovas and other cosmic structures, 'The Sunday Times' reported.

Hawking, the author of 'A Brief History of Time', will detail the plans of this super map during a talk to some of the world's most eminent scientists at the Starmus science conference, which begins on Monday in Tenerife, Spain.

Paul Shellard, Cambridge University's professor of cosmology and director of the Cosmos computer centre, said it would use images of radiation from the Big Bang captured by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite to draw up a map of the early universe.

"Planck gives us an amazing picture of the early distribution of matter and how that led to the structure of the modern universe," he said.

The images will be augmented by data from the Dark Energy Survey, which has a 13-feet diametre telescope in Chile, to map hundreds of millions of galaxies and reveal the nature of the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Shellard said the maps would improve when the European Space Agency's Euclid probe is launched in 2020.