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Posted by timothy on Monday January 12, 2004 @10:41PM from the human-chauvinist dept.

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."

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Paper Version by BigBlackDog · 2004-01-12 22:58 · Score: 5, Informative

This map was published as a special pull-out in New Scientist, just before Christmas last year. Very cool.

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Re:Voyagers and Pioneer. by TehHustler · 2004-01-12 23:08 · Score: 5, Informative

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

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Re:Sloan Great Wall? by nv5 · 2004-01-12 23:12 · Score: 5, Informative

here you go:

http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm
Re:Sloan Great Wall? by Scarblac · 2004-01-12 23:13 · Score: 4, Informative

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 :-)

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comoving future visibility limit by wine · 2004-01-12 23:14 · Score: 5, Informative

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 ;)
Re:the sun? by CaptainAlbert · 2004-01-12 23:18 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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Check out the "Zone of Avoidance"! by HawkinsD · 2004-01-12 23:54 · Score: 4, Informative

I love the "zone of avoidance."
Perhaps it's an area that smells bad?
Oh, no, wait, it has to do with dust.

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Re:Bad joke. by ideonode · 2004-01-13 00:09 · Score: 4, Informative

Others too have written about the (im)possibility of creating a map on a 1:1 scale.

Borges did so in "Of Exactitude in Science" in A Universal History of Infamy":

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

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:

When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take into account this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite

A nice summary of the three can be found here
Re:I have a major complaint by ChipMonk · 2004-01-13 01:31 · Score: 4, Informative

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.