If you’ve ever wished to bask within the cosmic majesty of all that exists or really feel the existential horror of your personal smallness, a brand new interactive map will present you the complete observable universe.

You can view the map at mapoftheuniverse.net, the place you’ll discover an outline of the sorts of objects that are seen and a timescale explaining how what’s seen is expounded to its age as a result of pace of sunshine. If you’ve ever struggled to grasp the connection between time and distance in what’s observable, this software is useful in displaying that.

The thought was to make one thing accessible to the general public slightly than extremely technical, the creators mentioned. “Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries,” map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins, mentioned in a statement. “But nobody took the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to people who are not scientists. Our goal here is to show everybody what the universe really looks like.”

The map makes use of knowledge from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a undertaking to create a 3D map of the universe utilizing a telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Running in varied types since 2000, knowledge from the survey has been used to review every part from how galaxies are distributed throughout the universe and the place darkish matter is perhaps positioned to the properties of stars within the Milky Way.

Data from the survey masking a specific slice of the sky was used to make the map, which exhibits 200,000 galaxies, each showing as a small dot. Right on the very backside of the map is a dot akin to the Milky Way.

“In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets,” Ménard mentioned. “We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale.”

As properly as visualizing the scope of the observable universe, the map additionally makes use of shade to reveal the redshift of various galaxies, with extra distant galaxies showing redder as a result of the growth of the universe stretches the spectrum of sunshine coming from them.

“Growing up I was very inspired by astronomy pictures, stars, nebulae and galaxies, and now it’s our time to create a new type of picture to inspire people,” mentioned Ménard.

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