A Map of the Universe, 10 Years In the Making

gabbo529 writes "Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have created a map of the universe called the 2MASS Redshift Survey. The astronomers put in 10 laborious years in creating the map and it is what they call the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created. 2MASS Redshift Survey extends closer to the Galactic plane than any other map of the universe before it; the region is generally obscured by dust."

Comments

So...

[Kenja]

What you're saying is its ten years out of date?

Re:So...

[JWSmythe]

    No, their high resolution picture is a (relatively) low result 2d single plane map. And honestly, I can't even begin to guess at the distances. I'll assume that's what the red shift color scale is, but then that indicates that the colors of the stars they represent.

    I'd assume that we (earth) is the center of the universe, as it's what we can see from here. The coordinates are nice and all, but I don't have a frame of reference to guess which direction is what.

    It would have been nice if they used a 3d engine of some sort, and plotted the stars in that. Or made the information available so someone else could do it. With just the raw data (3d coordinate, direction of motion, direction of expansion, color (RGB would be fine for most of us), and observed size, there'd probably be dozens of 3d representations of it within a week or two, just from the folks on here.

    At least there's at least something here

Re:So...not ten years out of date

[Anonymous Coward]

The map is not ten years out of date.

It is 380 million years out of date, in places.

Instead, it took ten years to find out how out of date it really was.

Re:Asshats. Where's the 3D?

[PvtVoid]

Here you go. Dipshit.

Celestia?

[thelandp]

We need to see this in Celestia!

Does the internet accept the challenge?

Re:Weird spiderweb/neuron concentrations

[buchner.johannes]

Here are good starting points on voids and filaments.

Re:Why is the equator empty?

[pherth]

It is the "shadow" of our own galaxy. This map plots objects which are far out of our own galaxy. If we look into directions where there are a lot of stars in our galaxy, the chance to detect outer-galaxy objects is small as they are behind our starts.

Re:Why is the equator empty?

[HuguesT]

This map is in galactic coordinates, this means our own galaxy runs along the equator of this map. It is also obscuring the view, hence the lack of data in this area of the map.

Re:Weird spiderweb/neuron concentrations

[boristhespider]

....it's a tenet of cosmology (which seems more or less justified) that if you look on large enough scales it *is* a homogeneous mixture of galaxies. If it wasn't, our cosmological models would be pure baloney. (The interesting part comes when you try and actually prove that this tangled network of strings and voids and filaments and massive clumps of superclusters averages out to a homogeneous universe, given that we can't define a meaningful average in general relativity. It seems very likely, especially given that the standard cosmological model works so damned well, but there are enough odd features (dark energy, for example) that suggest something slightly odd might be going on with this implicit averaging. Or of course the averaging could work fine and it's actually a scalar field slowly rolling down its potential, or a manifestation of two branes moving slowly closer to one-another, or a reduction in gravity's effects at low curvatures or.....)

"out to a distance of 380 million light-years"

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Only 380? That's a pity. An old friend that lives 380,000,006 light years away is always inviting me over but there's no way I'd find his place without a map.

It's probably not that far as-the-crow-flies, but light takes a longer, curvy path.

You know its big when . . .

[Punko]

You know the universe is large, when things out to 380 LY away are referred to as "local"