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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."
I can see my house...
mailto:EatSpamAndDie@princeweb.com
Great.. but where the hell are the restrooms?
With 500k graphical images to download you can be sure that by the time you read this you are too late - its been slashdotted!!
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!
Oooh, the Total Perspective Vortex!
*waits for Gargravarr to make an appearance*
I heard that next time they are going to release the last decimal of pi.
class he-man extends man!
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!
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?
There is no such thing as a good lie.
There is, however, such a thing as a good model, as any true scientist will tell you. Obviously, the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself; however, the derivation of useful models which are by design imperfect is absolutely at the heart of science.
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 */
Investors showed their appreciation and stock prices backed all the way up to the fifth floor, when a plumber was called to alleviate the massive flooding.
signatures are for fools with hands
Pretty cool picture though; It'll look real nice alongside the Unix Family Tree on the wall. If only there was a landscape version... time for some PostScript hacking I guess.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
If you zoom in on the SDSS galaxies at about 1 giga-parsec, it looks like one of them's broadcasting a message... looks like... "Can you hear me now?"... that can't be right.
These sigs are more interesting tha
the restaurant at the end of the universe!
So this map must be a fake!
The Chinese government is claiming to have property rights over all thing relating to "Great Walls" and are demanding the universe pay royalties for using this "Great Wall". In other news, the computer used to generate this map of the universe was running Linux so SCO is now claiming ownership over the entire universe. Permits to live in their universe may be purchased at any local SCO vendor for $699.
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
Proud owner of a Mensa membership card.
You should have returned it to its owner.
>Maybe we should suggest a Sun Base to our deer leader
George is a deer leader? That explains some things.
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
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
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.)
It's got to be somewhere on the map!
All spelling mistakes are in my mind and are faithfully reproduced by my fingers
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..
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
This is clearly wrong. It doesn't look anything like the map in Frontier: Elite II.
All flat maps of the US are lies. I mean, don't these people realize that it's impossible to make an acurate flat representation of a curved surface? Rivers change course, mountains are growing and erodeing, and don't even get me started on changing town and county boundaries. Besides, some of these maps have less than 50 meter accuracy in the placement of roads. They are lying to their customers!
SCO won't be happy when they find out they're not at the center of it...
Brings to mind this passage from Lewis Carroll, 1897:
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
But where's Hell and that old fart on his throne?
m l
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl174b/chain.ht
Obviously the Spanish Inquisition got to them first. Incidentally, the link says the Catholic Church finally agreed the Earth wasn't at the centre of the solar system in 1983!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
What are you talking about?
This is a GREAT model/map for teaching. the general population sit's ther eand simply drools when they see a log chart so this is obviousally not for general public consumption but for scientists and students to use to get a better grasp on spatial locations from earth center at that given point in time.
pan this all you want, but I was able to teach my child some very important facts about our solar system with this chart. Her astronomical sciences teacher at her middle school was not able to explain a couple of the topics as clearly as this chart/map does.
This is a great tool, if you are not able to understand it's usefulness that is your loss.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
did you notice the name of the primary author from the preprint on astro-ph/0310571?!
J. Richard Gott III - and guess what "Gott" means in german?
(same as english "god" of course!
Wow, so Earth really is at the center of the universe! I knew it!
begin 644
LOL, that post made the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sound like a secretive spy satellite. :-)
Actually, WMAP is a hugely successful astronomical microwave observatory which sits at Earth's second Lagrange Point (L2). L2 is 1.5 million kilometers on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. This informative page shows the location and how the probe got there very clearly.
The WMAP was launched in June of 2001 and has made a map of the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with much higher resolution, sensitivity, and accuracy than its predecessor, COBE. It has been a huge success.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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
"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word!"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth of course."
"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.
"Mostly harmless!" shouted Arthur.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
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
Perhaps less scientific, but it looks cooler: An Atlas of the Universe
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").
I had to park out near Rigel and walk in. Who wants to bet my radio will still be there when I get back? Rigel's a tough neighborhood. I walked in to a bar and ordered a shot. Everybody ducked.
All flat maps of the US are lies.
You bet they are. I've spent hours looking for the gigantic 'M' that's supposed to be near the immense yellow dotted line crossing through my town.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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]
I found Waldo hidden in the Great Wall!
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
"Report from the NEA: public school officials are elated! One administrator says: 'since we eliminated tests there is no more prayer in school!'. "
Have you hugged your penguin today?
Maybe we should suggest a Sun Base to our deer leader :)
I've heard the people on the Sun have had problems with global warming and high levels of background radation. In their favour though, they do seem to have got nuclear fusion working, which we have so far failed to do here on Earth.
If you actually looked at the map, and rtfa, you would see that it is not a navigational map, but rather an attempt to juxtapose our insignficance in the observable universe, and our absolute significance in being the point of observation of the universe.
"Objects close to us may be inconsequential in terms of the whole universe but they are important to us," (Dr. Gott, from the article)
But then again, your stunning cognitive ability to discredit this 'map' without even understanding why it was done, should silence a mere layman like myself. Mensa would be proud.
I think I see my dad.
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.
Confirmed. Last time I took a trip around the Sun, it took me about a year to do it. And for free ! Food and accomodation at your expense, though.
Space tourism is much more affordable than some say.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
I took the test, scored enough to be accepted but declined. I saw too many members with the same attitude as the Bad Joke poster and I don't like it.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Quaoar.
Big space rock.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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....
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Anyone want to share some light on this?
Thanks!
-db
"What does god need with a starship?"
So Gallileo was wrong. The universe does revolve around the earth ;)
Obligatory reference to centerfolds and geeks.
Carry on.