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."

Comments

Paper Version

[BigBlackDog]

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

Re:Voyagers and Pioneer.

[TehHustler]

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

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[nv5]

here you go:

http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm

comoving future visibility limit

[wine]

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?

[CaptainAlbert]

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.