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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?
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.
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the restaurant at the end of the universe!
So this map must be a fake!
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.
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
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!
Brings to mind this passage from Lewis Carroll, 1897:
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
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.
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
"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
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
Yes, except someone got a decimal point wrong. Slashdot readers still have their souls, but no lives.
(-:
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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.