One of the teams, led by Chris Blake of the University of British Columbia, Canada, has created the largest map of the heavens ever produced. It includes more than a million galaxies and the farthest sits more than 5 billion light years from Earth.

The other group, led by Nikhil Padmanabhan at Princeton University in the US looked at 600,000 galaxies covering a similar region – about one-tenth of the sky. But both final maps rely on only 10,000 spectral measurements.