After gazing up at a patch of sky last night near Polaris, the North Star, astronomers completed the largest map of the universe ever created. Compiled over the past 5 years by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the map features a total of 47 million galaxies. That’s 13 million more galaxies than originally planned: a boon made possible by DESI’s ability to map galaxies across the northern sky at unprecedented speed. DESI’s aim is to look for ripples in the distribution of galaxies at various distances from Earth, which tell astronomers how fast the universe was expanding at different times under the influence of an unknown force referred to as dark energy. Earlier data from DESI hinted that this force has varied in wholly unexpected ways , a sign that dark energy might not be a constant. As a result, researchers will be eagerly awaiting the analysis of this latest map.…