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

Voyagers and Pioneer.

[kiwioddBall]

It is interesting to see the Voyagers and Pioneer spacecraft on there. It is a fascinating subject for me, I believe that our technology will advance at sufficient speed that we will actually catch up with these craft with some future technology, and the issue will come up as to whether we bring them back to Earth as museum pieces or leave them on their course with special protection orders on them.

Food for thought.

And on an unrelated topic - Be careful - there is an acronymic something called WMAP lurking just on the far side of the moon, obviously hiding from earth.

I'm sure it is waiting for the perfect moment to attack!

Sloan Great Wall?

[sakusha]

What is this bit on the map about the Sloan Great Wall? I googled around but only found a reference to the map itself. If this is the biggest cosmic structure ever discovered, news of it sure hasn't traveled very far outside the astronomer's circles. What is the Sloan Great Wall?

Not 1.3 Billion light years long

[wsloand]

The wall is actually 760 million light years wide... the comparison is that one light year is 1.3 billion times the length of the Great Wall of China. (Info is from here.)

good, but what about those surprise galaxies?

[Janek Kozicki]

Surprise Galaxies at the Edge of Observable Space do not fit here?

If I'm right they would be somewhere above the Sloan Great Wall..

Re:Bad joke.

[wildsurf]

thus you can't create such a map.

Brings to mind this passage from Lewis Carroll, 1897:

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

""Only six inches!"exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.

Re:Urinals in Space!

[wildsurf]

which will be able to flush billions upon billions of stars into their new "Sloan Black Hole."

Interestingly, you don't need a black hole to get rid of unwanted material. Due to the expansion of spacetime, simply rocket something away from you faster than the escape velocity of your local group of galaxies (perhaps 1000km/sec), and eventually it will vanish from your observable universe, or at least become redshifted to invisibility. (The flip side, is that alien civilizations near the edge of our observable universe may be rocketing their trash in our direction as we speak. And if it hits us, not only would it be a highly icky experience for us, we would be fundamentally unable to get back at them for it.)

Another map

[swinerd]

Perhaps less scientific, but it looks cooler: An Atlas of the Universe

Distances in miles, in case anyone's interested.

[Chas]

The map is a representation of approximately 11.912216896 DUODECILLION MILES.

That's 11,912,216,896,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000 miles longhand.

I wonder how many burgers White Castle would have to serve to make a stack that reaches THAT far....

Re:complete, sure

[mark-t]

Actually, the last digit of pi either 5, 9 or 4.

This can be proven, if somewhat bizarrely, by showing that since pi is the sum of an infinite number of rationals, and there are an infinite number of them that have decimals which repeat forever, that for a hypothetical digit position that is infinitely far away from the decimal point, each digit from 1 through 9 would occur infinitely many times. The sum of 1 through 9 is 45. Since each digit occurs the same number of times, the sum in this column must be 45 times some number which has a last digit of 5 or 0. Since this hypothetical infinityith digit is the last digit of pi, there is no carryover from following digits sums, so the last digit must either be 5 or 0. If it were 0, then you could drop this digit and perform the same task as before, but this time since you are adding an extra 4, the sum must either end in a 4 or a 9 for this digit.

QED

Galatic Center

[dbooster]

This may be off-topic, but it's something I have been wondering about that this story reminded me of. That is, have there been any more theories or discoveries as to what lies at the galatic center? The last theory I heard was one of hundreds of massive black holes, tho I never did understand how that would cause the massive sphere of light we always see at the galatic centers of other galaxies.

Anyone want to share some light on this?

Thanks!

-db
"What does god need with a starship?"