Slashdot Mirror
You Are Here (On Earth)
Anonymous Coward writes "NY Times today has an essay about a map of the entire universe produced by two Princeton astronomers using a variety of data including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Its view begins with the Earth at the bottom and extends back almost to the Big Bang at the top, including such objects as the Sloan Great Wall, 1.37 billion light-years long. The map can be found here."
A usual with the NYT, Google is your friend. Just click on the "If the URL is valid..." link, and here you go, without any need to make up data for the subscription form!
This map was published as a special pull-out in New Scientist, just before Christmas last year. Very cool.
/* This comment may not be thread-safe */
WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) is sat in the L2 langrange point, beyond the Moon, monitoring all sorts of radiation type stuff. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=wilkinson+microwave+anisotropy+probe&spel l=1
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
here you go:
l l.htm
http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wa
I found this: http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm. Googled for 'wall light years sloan' after a few other tries :-)
Apparently an even bigger wall has been found, but I 'm no astronomer either :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
This weird comoving future visibility limit that is mentioned at the top of the map is explained in detail in the paper:
;)
[...] which shows how far a photon can travel in co-moving coordinates from the inflationary big bang to the infinite future.[...] This is the co-moving future visibility limit. No matter how long we wait, we will not be able to see further than this. This is surprisingly close.
Yeah, that's only 19,027Mpc
From google. http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm
Looking at the map, you'll see that the sun is actually not that much farther from the Earth than Mars
It looks that way, but in fact the y-scale is logarithmic. Mars is at around 0.4AU away, whereas the Sun is (by definition) at 1.0AU. So really, the Sun is more than twice as far away.
Plus, this map must be a snapshot in time, since it's quite possible for mars to be "on the other side" of the Sun, and thus further away from Earth than it, depending on the relative phase of the two planets' orbits.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Perhaps it's an area that smells bad?
Oh, no, wait, it has to do with dust.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
I guess the drawers of this map were well aware of all the problems you mention. It is however not their goal to produce an accurate reproduction of the universe, but rather an idea of how large a large scale can be. Then, it is a static plot, and no time involved here. Think of it as a snapshot. If you had read the article you would have noted that the authors gave a concise introduction of how their map was drawn. The map should show large scale structures and keep the shapes locally correct. Therefore, they have to use a (4D, of course) metric (the Friedmann metric) that does just this: It introduces so-called co-moving coordinates which keep objects at a constant position while the universe expands. Perhaps you should think about reading the article first and then complain. There is a reason for this model that they did. When you want to understand large scale structures, 4D stuff does not count, since how would you imagine this anyway, you want to have an impression of size as we see it, since we do not have another frame to see it from... There the map does a great job.
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
Borges did so in "Of Exactitude in Science" in A Universal History of Infamy":
Umberto Eco then took up the challenge in "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" in How to Travel with a Salmon:
A nice summary of the three can be found here
What we are plotting on the map is the universe in 'comoving coordinates', which are determined by cosmological parameters (amount of luminous matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe). They're the ones that determine the global curvature of space, and in the past few years have been measured very accurately (eg., with WMAP).
What you seem to be objecting to (among other things) is that the map should somehow depict local curvature as well (eg., you talk about closed timelike loops, black holes, etc). However, note that in that case you'd also have to object to every map of the _Earth_ that has ever been made, because it doesn't take into account the small increase in Earth's area due to mountains and depressions ("And their map would be f**ked around mountains for obvious reasons").
Its in the LaGrange L2 point, opposite the earth from the sun.. ( so earth shields it from sunlight and solar interference, I suppose. ). Anyway, its mission is to map the picture of the Universe as seen by microwave radiation.
Here's some links courtesy of Google...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
You're forgetting that the farther away you search, the farther back in time you see. What you observe a foot away from your eyes is roughly one nanosecond old. The events we see on the sun really occurred about seven minutes ago. And, somewhere waaaaaay out there, is the origin of some (very old) remnants of the Big Bang, which are just now reaching us.
There is the possibility that material from some other Big Crunch fed into what became our Big Bang, but its quantities and properties have nothing to do with our existence. For all intents and purposes, there is nothing "beyond" the Big Bang. And if there was, we are completely unable to observe it.
Quaoar.
Big space rock.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The restaurant was at the end of the universe in time, not space. IIRC, it was a place where you could get a good meal while you watched the universe end--over and over again. So if it were to be on that map, it would have to be within our light horizon, which means the end of the universe would have already happened here. The good news: the restaurant might be out there beyond our vision. The bad news: we might see it one day. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
twice as far, so on a logaritmic map it would extend a constant small distance beyond.
However, you misunderstand the big bang. It's not like a great explosion throwing matter away from a center. It's spacetime ITSELF that expands, taking the contained matter with it. Think of a big rubber sheet with the galaxies attached to it. Now stretch the sheet. All galaxies move away from each other, but there is no center (fold the sheet into a sphere and slowly blow up the resulting balloon if that makes it easier to visualize the absence of a center for you).